“Easy to say no to Felicity? Easy for you to say no to any one?”
Again he winced, though this time, if every one had their due, the wince should have been hers. Had she forgotten, or was she impossibly alluding to the one pregnant occasion on which he had not had the strength of mind to say no? Her voice, high and decided, cut into his strangled thought.
“Whichever way we settle it, must be at once—to-day. If she does not hear to the contrary by return of post, Felicity is quite capable of taking silence for consent, and packing the girl off by the next train, as she did her pet inebriate to Mrs. Holmes last summer.”
“I will leave you to decide,” he answered, with an effort at flight, contemptible since it was unsuccessful.
“You will do nothing of the kind,” answered she, seizing him by the lapel of his coat, as he passed her on his way to the door. “You will not shift the responsibility of the whole affair upon me.”
“What do you feel like?” he answered resignedly, not struggling in a clasp which had more of mastery than endearment in it. “Surely it will affect you infinitely more than it will me.”
Seeing him thus docile, she loosed her hold. “At my age,” she said, “all changes in the framework of one’s life seem to be for the worse.”
“Then let it be no,” he answered, though not again endeavouring for freedom, since he felt that one step in that direction would merely mean recapture.
“And yet,” she said, a sort of wistfulness that he too well knew coming into her hard light eyes, “the house is very silent; but for Jock it might be a house of the dead sometimes.”
“We are not very rowdy, I suppose,” he answered, following the ups and downs of her thought with a rueful gentleness.