“Why?” said David, turning at the door. Mrs. Havergill assumed an air of matronly importance.
“It might ha’ given her a turn,” she said, “for the pore girl did scream something dreadful. I’m sure it give me a turn, but that’s neither here nor there. What I was thinking of was Mrs. Blake’s condition, sir.”
Mrs. Havergill was obviously a little nettled at David’s expression.
“Nonsense,” said David quickly.
Mrs. Havergill went back to Sarah.
“‘Nonsense,’ he says, and him a doctor. Why, there was me own pore mother as died with her ninth, and all along of a turn she got through seeing a child run over. And he says, ‘Nonsense.’”
David walked up the hill in a state of mind between impatience and amusement. How women’s minds did run on babies. He supposed it was natural, but there were times when one could dispense with it.
He found Mary at home and alone. “Elizabeth? Oh, no, she hasn’t been near me for days,” said Mary. “As it happened, I particularly wanted to see her. But she hasn’t been near me.”
She considered that Elizabeth was neglecting her. Only that morning she had told Edward so.
“She doesn’t come to see me on purpose,” she had said. “But I know quite well why. I don’t at all approve of the way she’s going on, and she knows it. I don’t think it’s right. I think some one ought to tell David. No, Edward, I really do. I don’t understand Elizabeth at all, and she’s simply afraid to come and see me because she knows that I shall speak my mind.”