"Ah, no," said Boussingault. "It is that madame and you, monsieur, shall dine with me. To-night? To-morrow night?"
Stainton accepted for the following evening.
"And at what spot would you prefer, monsieur?"
"I don't know," said Jim. "I have eaten sole à la Marguery. We might catch that in its native waters: we might dine at Marguery's."
"Well," the Frenchman shrugged, "Marguery is not bad. At least the kitchen is tolerable. But you should eat your sole as she swims."
They were not, however, destined to keep the appointment on the day set, for, during that morning came a petit bleu from Boussingault, postponing the dinner for a week, and followed by a letter overflowing with fine spencerian regrets to the effect that its writer had been imperatively summoned to Grenoble for consultation in an illness "occurring in a family distinguished."
"I don't care if we never see him," said Muriel. "I could hear him through the door: he talks too loud."
They consoled themselves and wearied themselves with sightseeing, and often this tried Muriel's nerves. Secretly she still watched for the appearance of signs to indicate her condition and secretly she tightened her stays, long before any signs could appear. She was often sick in the mornings, though with decreasing recurrence, and, when she began to feel relief by the diminution, she became the more despondent upon realisation of its cause. Moreover, even the comfort of petit déjeuner in bed did not compensate for those crumbs for which no one could be held responsible.
True to his policy to "let nature take her course," Stainton maintained a firm reticence upon the subject uppermost in the minds of both, but this reticence was applied only to his speech; and his solicitude, his patient but patent care, and his evident anxiety often annoyed her, since they kept her destiny before her and seemed to her apprehensive imagination—what they were far from being—no more than the expressions of a fear that she might make some physical revelation of her state in a public and embarrassing manner.
"You don't think of me!" she one day wept, when he had put her into a taxi-mètre to drive a few hundred yards.