Aggie folded up a child’s frock with great deliberation, and pressed it, gently but firmly, into the portmanteau.
“I must go,” she said, gravely. “Arthur wants me.”
Mrs. Purcell was looking on with unfeigned grief at her daughter’s preparations for departure. Aggie had gone down to Queningford, not for a flying visit, but to spend the greater part of the autumn. She and Arthur had had to abandon some of the arrangements they had planned together; and, though he had still insisted in general terms on Aggie’s two years’ rest, the details had been left to her. Thus it happened that a year of the rest-cure had hardly rolled by before Aggie had broken down, in a way that had filled them both with the gravest anxieties for the future. For if she broke down when she was resting, what would she do when the two years were up and things had to be more or less as they were before? Aggie was so frightened this time that she was glad to be packed off to her mother, with Willie and Dick and Emmy and the baby. The “girls,” Kate and Eliza, had looked after them, while Aggie lay back in the warm lap of luxury, and rested for once in her life.
All Aggie’s visits had ended in the same way. The same letter from home, the same firm and simple statement: “Arthur wants me. I must go,” and Aggie was gone before they had had a look at her.
“John and Susie will be quite offended.”
“I can’t help it. Arthur comes before John and Susie, and he wants me.”
She had always been proud of that—his wanting her; his inability to do without her.
“I don’t know,” she said, “what he will have done without me all this time.”
Her mother looked at her sharply, a look that, though outwardly concentrated on Aggie, suggested much inward criticism of Aggie’s husband.
“He must learn to do without you,” she said, severely.