“Do not say that, or you stop me,” she returned; “or say it if you can, remembering everything, and I will frame my request differently. For the sake of the man who forgave you and me, both of us, will you promise to grant me one favour?”
“I will.”
“I want you not to speak harshly to your wife. I want you not to reproach her. I want you never by word or look to lay this—this accident at her door, whether Harry lives or whether he dies.”
He remained for a few moments looking down at the carpet on the floor of the carriage, then he answered—“You do not know everything, and your request is harder to grant than perhaps you can imagine, but still I will keep my promise—I will not reproach her;” and he got up from his seat and went to the opposite window to that at Phemie’s left hand, and looked out over the country, and stamped his foot for very impatience at the slow rate of travelling, and wondered if they ever should arrive at the junction, and how long it would take to get a special train ready.
She let him run on for a time in this manner, while she searched about for some form of words in which she might convey an idea of the worst to him. Over and over again he said—“nothing ever really hurt children; that they were like cats and had nine lives;” he wondered if Mr. Aggland would think of having a surgeon down from London; he mourned about his own absence from home, and then he began abusing the railway arrangements once more, and finally, pulling out his watch for the hundredth time, declared they ought to be at the junction in ten minutes.
“Once there, instead of waiting for the express we must get a special, and push on at a very different pace to this.”
He flung himself into the seat by the window, as he spoke, and Phemie having at last made up her mind that she would tell him, left her place, and took the one opposite to that he occupied.
She had been thinking over the words she should use for hours, and yet now no word she had intended to employ was uttered.
“Basil.”
“Yes, Phemie.”