It was wonderful to notice how her habit of tone held good in that peril which whitened her face and made her tremble from head to foot as she stood. From her voice alone, one would have implied no more than some playful extravagance on the doctor's part; she still hoped that it could be carried off on the plane of small affairs.
"You would go out without a proper hat on, Jakes," said Ford suddenly. "Feel stuffy in the head, don't you?"
"What do you mean—stuffy?" demanded Jakes.
But already the vigor that had spurred him to a demonstration was exhausted and the need for alcohol, the burning physical famine for nerve-reinforcement, had him in its grip.
"Stuffy?" repeated Ford, watching him closely. "Oh, you know what I mean. I 've seen chaps like it heaps of times after a day in the sun; they get the queerest fancies. You really ought to get a proper hat, though."
Mrs. Jakes took him by the arm persuasively. "Don't you think you 'd better lie down for a bit, Eustace—in the study?"
"In the study?" He blinked twice or thrice painfully, and made an endeavor to smile. "Yes, perhaps. This—er—stuffy feeling, you know—yes."
His wife's arm steered him to the door, and once out of the room he dropped it and fairly bolted across the echoing hall to his refuge. In the drawing-room they heard his eager feet and the slam of the door that shut him in to his miserable deliverance from pain, and the double snap of the key that locked out the world and its censorious eyes.
"You—you just managed it," said Margaret to Ford. The queer inconsequent business had left her rather breathless. "But wasn't it horrible?"
"Some day we shan't be able to talk him down, and then it 'll be worse," answered Ford soberly. "That 'll be the end for Mrs. Jakes' home. But you played up all right, you know. You did the decent thing, and in just the right way. And I was glad, because, you know, I 've never been quite sure how you 'd shape."