“You don’t feel bad after all that play?” she said, taking his hand and giving him that look of solicitude and affection that can be the best thing in the world to receive.
“Not I—I’m as right as possible. I can’t remember that I ever was hurt.”
“I hate you riding the grey to-morrow at the show,” she went on; “I shall be miserable all the time. If I were riding him myself I shouldn’t remember that there was any danger—and I suppose there isn’t really—but it’s awfully different to look on. I know it’s very rotten of me to be afraid, but you know I did get an awful fright about you—that time.”
He laughed. “You mustn’t think about all that,” he said gently, “that time is over and done with.”
There was a pause.
“I want to tell you a thing I saw at the club just now, a thing in the paper——” He seemed rather at a loss how to go on. “It was about Glasgow,” he said uncomfortably. The hand that was in his became rather stiff. “Poor chap,” Hugh went on, “he was—he met with an accident—I mean—in fact, he’s been killed.” There was silence. “He fell down the shaft of a mine or waterworks or something that he was engineering out in the Argentine Republic, and was killed on the spot. It’s a ghastly sort of thing,” he ended nervously.
She turned her head till her eyes were hidden against his shoulder. “All right, Hughie,” she said, in a muffled voice, “it’s all right. You know I don’t mind. Not really. It’s only—it’s so horrible—and it makes me think of all that time—and what they said of the bad luck, and everything——”
“Yes, I know,” he said, putting his arm round her.
“You do believe me still that I was only an idiot?” she said, looking up at him with the tears in her eyes.
He kissed her.