"Good." And he departed, whistling softly; clear sign that all was well with his world.
But twenty minutes later when Paul came in to look for a strayed pipe, he found Honor, quite oblivious of 'things,' crying quietly behind her hands. He retreated hastily; but she heard him and looked up.
"Don't go, Paul. I want you."
No three words in the language could have pierced him with so keen a thrust of happiness.
"Do you mean . . . can I help you?" he asked eagerly. "I felt sure something was wrong."
"Did you? I'm a bad actress! But . . it's about Baby,—the other Paul," she added, smiling through wet lashes. "I have just had a letter from Mrs Rivers that makes me want to pack my boxes and go straight back to Dalhousie."
"And shall you? Is it serious enough for that?"
"Oh, how can one tell?" she cried desperately, her voice breaking on the words. "It mightn't seem serious to you. He has fever, and a touch of dysentery, and terrible fits of crying with his double teeth. Mrs Rivers seems anxious; and of course one thinks . . . of convulsions. It all sounds rather a molehill, doesn't it, after the horrors we have been living in here? And perhaps only a mother would make a mountain out of it. But I think mothers must have God's leave to be foolish . . . sometimes!"
Fresh tears welled up, and she hid her face again. Paul could only wait beside her tongue-tied, half-sitting on the edge of the writing-table, wondering what dear, unfathomable impulse had led her to admit him to the sanctuary of her sorrow; realising, so far as a masculine brain can realise, something of the struggle involved in woman's twofold responsibility—to the man, and to the gift of the man.
It is the eternally old, eternally new tragedy of Anglo-Indian marriage; none the less poignant because it is repeated ad infinitum. Love him as she may, it costs more for a wife, and still more for a mother, to stand loyally by her husband in India than the sheltered women of England can conceive. For to read of such contingencies in print, is by no means the same thing as having one's heart of flesh pierced by the sword of division.