"It's just laziness and selfishness," she wrote in her sweeping fashion, "when you know how I look out for your letters, to leave me a whole week without a line. If it was me, there might be some excuse, because there's always something or another going on, and I never seem to get a minute to sit down and write. But you must have hours and hours of spare time in the long days down there. I expect you play chess with Major Wyndham all the while, and quite forget about writing to me. I suppose if you were ill some one would have the decency to write and tell me. But if you don't write yourself directly you get this, I shall think something dreadful has happened; and it's such a nuisance not to know if you are all right. I can't enjoy things properly a bit."
And so on, ad lib., da capo, until the end.
Having read it through twice, with a flicker of amusement in his tired eyes, he sat down straightway, wrote for a quarter of an hour at the top of his speed, and left the letter ready for the afternoon post. It contained a polite apology for remissness, followed by an account in bare outline of his doings during the past five days; a few details in regard to Harry's illness; and an intimation that if letters were short, she must remember that, for the present, every hour of spare time would be taken up with nursing the Boy or writing detailed accounts to his mother. And, in truth, before that wearisome illness was over Mrs[.] Denvil and her boy's Captain had struck up a lasting friendship across six thousand miles of sea.
On her return from a tennis party the following afternoon Evelyn Desmond found the letter awaiting her; and her face took such rueful lines as she read it, that Honor's anxiety was roused.
"Evelyn—what is it?" she asked, a slight catch in her breath.
Evelyn shrugged her shoulders in meek resignation.
"Oh, it's only rather more Kohatish than usual! Mr. Denvil seems to be quite bad with typhoid, and Theo has been galloping over half the Frontier after outposts—such rubbishy work for a man like that! And—oh, you'd better read it all for yourself. You needn't bother about it having been written for me. It might just as well be a paragraph out of a newspaper!"
With a childish grimace she tossed the letter across the table. But hid in her heart lay the rankling knowledge that she had been both hasty and unjust to her husband, who had emphasised the fact by ignoring it,—a method peculiarly his own.