“Am I a greater scarecrow than you expected in this coat? I was told by a man I met in Pall Mall on Tuesday that I looked like a clothes-peg! Well, one might easily look like a worse thing; and, thank God, I never had much superfluous flesh!”
It is clear that he scarcely knows what he is saying; and that, though his speech is perfectly rational in its triviality, it is so more by instinct and habit than by any conscious command over tongue or thought.
“The doctors passed you?” she asks, squeezing out the words with a parsimony that proves how little trust she, for her part, can place in her organ of utterance.
“Yes; they said that the voyage would finish setting me up. So it will.”
The last clause is, as the girl feels, a reassurance addressed to the grudging doubt and negation in her eyes—the eyes that verify how loosely the clothes hang on a frame that betrays the fact more plainly than a less largely built one would have done. How easily, how reasonably, how nothing more than humanly, they—that callous Medical Board—might have sent him back—so little more than half-cured as he is—for another fortnight, another week! Another week! yes; that he might be here to dance at her wedding!
“So this is your home! This is where you have spent your life!” Binning says, looking round at the room seen for the first and last time, and in which, in fancy, he will have to set her beside the armchair that he divines to be Sir George’s.
He pauses, not for the moment quite equal to bear placing, even in imagination, the jeune ménage. Yet he will not spare himself the pain of knowing what corner of the fragrant homely room, that bears the imprint of her and her tastes and occupations, will shelter the warm domestic nearness to each other of husband and wife.
“Tell me where you all sit, that, when I am gone, I may picture you.”
“That is Uncle George’s chair,” she says, pointing to the one that the young man had rightly assigned to the house’s master; and then stops.
“And Rupert’s?”