“No; for I’ve always kept money in the house,” he said quickly. “And glad I am now that I did. It used to annoy my mother—it used to make her afraid that we should be burgled. But of course I never told any one else.” He looked at her rather oddly. “I’ve quite a lot of money here, with me now.”
“I wonder if you would be so kind as to cash me a cheque?” She grew a little pink. She was not used to asking even small favours from her friends. Impulsive, easy-going as she seemed, there was yet a very proud and reticent streak in Mary Otway’s nature.
“Of course I will. In fact——” and then he stopped abruptly, for she had gone up to her table, and was opening the letter she had just written to James Hayley.
“Could you really conveniently let me have as much as twenty pounds?” and she held him out the cheque.
“Certainly. Then you’re not expecting Miss Rose back for a minute or two?”
“Oh, no! She only went out twenty minutes ago.”
He was still standing, and Mrs. Otway suddenly felt herself to be inhospitable.
“Do sit down,” she said hurriedly. Somehow in the last few minutes her point of view, her attitude to her friend, her kind, considerate, courteous friend, had altered. She no longer looked at him with indulgent half-contempt as an idle man, a man who, though he was very good to his mother, and sometimes very useful to herself, had always led, excepting during the South African War (and that was a long time ago), an idle, useless kind of life. He was going now to face real danger, perchance—but her mind shrank from that thought, from that dread possibility—death itself. Somehow the fact that Major Guthrie was going with his regiment to France brought the War perceptibly nearer to Mrs. Otway, and made it for the first time real.
He quietly took the easy chair she had motioned him to take, and she sat down too.
“Well, I have to confess that you were right and I wrong! You always thought we should fight the Germans.” She tried to speak playfully, but there was a certain pain in the admission, for she had always scorned his quiet prophecies and declared him to be, in this one matter, prejudiced and unfair.