He drank the tea mechanically without troubling to hold the cup, which seemed to take the initiative with a precision and an independence of support, which would have surprised him at any other time. The tea, what little there was of it, was the nastiest he had ever tasted. It might have been made in a brandy bottle. But it certainly cleared the air. Gradually the room came back. The light came back. He came back himself. It was all hardly credible. There was Di sitting opposite him, evidently quite unaware that he had been momentarily overcome, and assiduously engaged in pouring out another cup of tea. She had taken off her gloves, and he watched her cool slender hands give herself a lump of sugar. (Only one small lump, John observed. He must remember that.) Then she filled up the teapot from the little gurgling silver kettle. What forethought. Wonderful! and yet all apparently so natural. She seemed to do it as a matter of course. He ought to be helping her, but somehow he was not. Would she take bread and butter, or one of those little round things? She took a piece of bread and butter. Perhaps it would be as well to listen to what she was saying. He lost the first part of the sentence because she began to stir her tea at the moment, and he could not attend to two things at once. But presently he heard her say—
"Mrs. Courtenay thinks young people ought not to mind missing tea altogether. But I do mind; don't you? I think it is the pleasantest meal in the day."
John cautiously assented that it was. He felt that he must be very careful, or a slight dizziness which was now rapidly passing off might be noticed.
Di went on talking unconcernedly, bending her burnished golden head in its little white bonnet over the teacups. She seemed to take a great interest in the tea-things, and the date of the apostle spoons. Presently she looked at him again, and a relieved smile came into her face.
"Are you ready for another cup?" she said. And it was not a dream any longer, but all quite real and true, and he was real too.
"No, thanks," said John, taking his cup with extreme deliberation from a table at his elbow, where he supposed he had set it down. "There is something wrong about the tea, I think. Do send yours away and have some more. It has a very odd taste."
"Has it?" said Di, meeting his eye firmly, but with an effort. "I don't notice it. On the contrary, I think it is rather good. Try another cup."
"Perhaps the water did not boil," suggested John feebly, reflecting that his temporary indisposition might have been the cause of his dislike, but anxious to conceal the fact.
"That is a direct reflection on my tea-making," said Di. "You had better be more careful what you say." And she quickly pushed a stumpy little liqueur-bottle behind the silver tea-caddy.
"I beg pardon, and ask humbly for another cup," said John, smiling. The pain had left him again, as it generally did after he had remained quiet for a time, and in the relief from it he had a vague impression that the present moment was too good to last. He did not know that it was usual to wash out a cup so carefully as Di did his, but she seemed to think it the right thing, and she probably knew. Anyhow, the second cup was capital. John was not allowed to drink tea. The doctors who were knitting firmly together again the slender threads that had so far bound him to this world, believed he was imbibing an emulsion of something or other strengthening and nauseous at that moment.