His position was strong; he repeated his question: "Wasn't it, I say?"
"It was a comfort to you, I suppose," Lucilla said, then. "We will leave it there."
He gave her a quick glance, angrily questioning. He had temporarily anchored against the fender now, and stood with his heels on it, his hands in his pockets.
"I suppose that it was a comfort to me was something, at any rate?" he asked. He shrugged an angry shoulder. "I was the one that had to go through the misery of it, I know that. I shan't easily forget the time before, when Billy was born, and I was shut up for a solid three weeks with your mother! Heavens! going about with a face like a funeral! Looking at me as if I was a monster every time I took up my hat to go out! I should think Vera Butt was a comfort to me! It wasn't as if you had been really ill. You know you were always saying you wanted to get up and come downstairs to be with us, weren't you?"
"I certainly should have liked better to be with you," Lucilla admitted.
"Well, and Vera said, 'Here's Luce lying tucked up as jolly as a sandboy, why shouldn't we be jolly too?'"
"Exactly; and she wasn't fretful, or complaining, or hysterical once, all the time, was she?"
His thoughts travelled back over the memories of the weeks of which they spoke; the weeks in which he had first begun to find Vera attractive. He saw the face which in that time he had, not without surprise, discovered to be pretty; he thought of the fun they had made between them, and heard her chattering, gay voice, and listened to their mingled laughter. A smile moved his lips for an instant; he looked up, caught his wife's eye, and had a sudden feeling of looking foolish in her sight.
"She was a good little woman, when we wanted her, and I'm sorry if she's ill. That's all," he said. "The Butts aren't very well off, and she doesn't get the comforts a woman wants in illness."
"I'll go and see after her to-morrow," Lucilla said.