“Oh, well, I was just going to show you what mother is like. I—I was going out to lunch with a man, and—and—” Eustace was not a ready improvisator—“and she didn’t want me to go, so she stole all my trousers!”
Jane Hubbard started, as if, wandering through one of her favourite jungles, she had perceived a snake in her path. She was thinking hard. That story which Billie had told her on the boat about the man to whom she had been engaged, whose mother had stolen his trousers on the wedding morning ... it all came back to her with a topical significance which it had never had before. It had lingered in her memory, as stories will, but it had been a detached episode, having no personal meaning for her. But now.... “She did that just to stop you going out to lunch with a man?” she said slowly.
“Yes, rotten thing to do, wasn’t it?”
Jane Hubbard moved to the foot of the bed, and her forceful gaze, shooting across the intervening counterpane, pinned Eustace to the pillow. She was in the mood which had caused spines in Somaliland to curl like withered leaves.
“Were you ever engaged to Billie Bennett?” she demanded.
Eustace Hignett licked dry lips. His face looked like a hunted melon. The flannel bandage, draped around it by loving hands, hardly supported his sagging jaw.
“Why—er—”
“Were you?” cried Jane, stamping an imperious foot. There was that in her eye before which warriors of the lower Congo had become as chewed blotting-paper. Eustace Hignett shrivelled in the blaze. He was filled with an unendurable sense of guilt.
“Well—er—yes,” he mumbled weakly.
Jane Hubbard buried her face in her hands and burst into tears. She might know what to do when alligators started exploring her tent, but she was a woman.