Suddenly Margaret laid the letter down. She put it back on her plate with an abrupt gesture and he noted that she had gone pale, and that her mouth was wry as though with a bitter taste. She even withdrew her fingers from the sheet with exactly the movement of one who has by accident set his hand on some unexpected piece of foulness.
She went on with her breakfast quietly enough, but she did not look at her letters again. They were perhaps the first letters in years to come to the Sanatorium and be dismissed with a single perusal.
"Fog in London," said Mr. Samson, suddenly. "Feller writes as though it was the plague. He does n't know what it is to have too much bally sun."
The glare that shone through the window returned his glance unwinking.
"Fog?" responded Mrs. Jakes, alertly. "That is bad. Such dreadful things happen in fogs. I remember a lady at Home, who was divorced afterwards, who lost her way in a fog and didn't get home for two days, and even then she had somebody else's umbrella and could no more remember where she 'd got it than fly. And she was so confused and upset that all she could say to her husband was: 'Ed,'—his name was Edwin—'Ed, did you remember to have your hair cut?'"
"Had he remembered?" demanded Mr. Samson.
"I think not," replied Mrs. Jakes. "What with the worry, and the things the servant said, I don't believe he 'd thought of it. He always did wear it rather long."
"Think of that," said Mr. Samson, with solemn surprise.
Margaret finished her breakfast in silence and then gathered up her letters. Ford thought that as she picked up the sheet which had distressed her, she glanced involuntarily at him. But the look conveyed nothing and she departed in silence. He was careful not to follow her too soon.
It was not difficult to find her. For some two hours after breakfast was over, the only part of the Sanatorium which it was possible to inhabit with comfort was the stoep. The other rooms were given over to Fat Mary and her colleagues for the daily ceremony known as "doing the rooms," a festival involving excursions and alarms, skylarking, breakages and fights. To seek seclusion in the drawing-room, for example, was to be subjected to a cinematograph impression of surprised and shocked black faces peering round the door and vanishing, to scuffling noises on the mat and finally to hints from Mrs. Jakes herself: "Would you mind the girls just sweeping round your feet? They 're rather behindhand this morning."