“I need nursing, Mrs. Baines,” he answered sadly. “I need a great many things.”
“I wish I could give them to you.”
He looked at her curiously; as if the words came from him without his knowledge, he said suddenly, “I see Sir William Rammage is a little better.”
“I am going to inquire after him this morning,” she answered, and then she drew a little parcel from beneath her shawl. “I want you to put this into your pocket,” she said, “and to open it by-and-by; it is only a trifling proof that I thought of you as I came along.”
“I always think of you,” he said, almost reproachfully, as, without a word of thanks, he put the parcel out of sight.
“Not more than I do of you,” she said, in a low choking voice. “I hear you cough in my sleep; and it grieves me to think how hard you have to work.”
“I can’t take care of myself,” he said; “I was always careless, Mrs. Baines, and I must work. Fisher is a very fidgety man to work for; it has taken me three days to review a small book on American law, and even now I am not sure that he will be satisfied.”
His voice never varied, the expression of his eyes never changed save once for a moment. She had taken off her gloves and was resting her hands, thin and dry, on the ledge of the carriage window while she leant forward to talk to him, and suddenly he looked down at them. They seemed to repel him, he drew back a very little; she saw the movement and followed his eyes; she understood perfectly; for she had quick insight, and courage to face unflinchingly even truths that were not pleasant. She drew her hands away and rubbed them softly one over the other, as if by doing so she could put young life into them. Suddenly with a jerk the train moved.
“Good-bye,” she said excitedly. “Good-bye; if I write to the address in town will the letter be forwarded?”
But he could only nod. In a moment he was out of sight. He did not lean forward to look after her, he sat staring into space. “She must be seventy,” he said. “I wonder——” Then he felt in his pocket for the third-class ticket he no longer needed. “Probably they will return the amount I paid for it.” A sudden thought struck him. He looked at the ticket Mrs. Baines had given him. “It is for Portsmouth,” he said grimly. The one he had taken himself had been for Liphook.