“What do you do all day?” she asked. “Have you any society?”
He was silent for a moment, as if struggling with the destitution of speech that always beset him. “I can’t give you an account of all my days, Anne,” he said, and turned to the fire.
“I did not ask it, Alfred; you know that I never intrude upon your privacy. I had some news,” she went on, with a pathetic note in her voice, “and hoped it would be pleasing to you.”
“What is it?” The expression of his face had not changed for a moment from the one of sulky displeasure it had worn when she entered, and her manner betrayed a certain nervousness, as if she felt that he was with her against his will, and only by gentle propitiation could she keep him at all.
“Walter and Florence have offered to lend us their cottage at Witley. We can go to it to-morrow—if it is convenient to you, dear Alfred,” she added meekly.
“I shall not go there,” he said sullenly; and for a moment he looked her full in the face with his dull eyes.
“I thought the air of that locality was always beneficial to you,” she said, in the same tone in which she had last spoken.
“Thank you, I don’t wish to go to that ‘locality,’ and be laughed at.” He half mocked her as he spoke.
“Why should you be laughed at?” she asked, with almost a cry of pain in her voice, for she knew what the answer would be, beforehand; but the words were forced from her, she could not help them. He coughed and looked at her again.
“People generally laugh at a young man who marries an old woman, Anne.” She got up and went to the end of the room, and came back again, and put her hand upon his shoulder.