“In her absence!” repeats Rupert, with an accent of the most acute astonishment. “Do you expect me to believe that that angel of mercy has forsaken her post?”
“She has got the jaundice!”
“The jaundice!” repeats the young man, with more of entertainment than compassion in his low laugh. “Poor Féo! The yellow danger! What on earth has given her over as a prey to it at this cruelly unpropitious moment?”
“And you are to nurse dear Binning instead of her? What a blessed, blessed change for him!”
There is not the faintest trace of jealousy in his tone, and the most unaffected friendliness in his mention of the sick man; but she wishes that he had not called him “dear.” It makes her illogically feel more of a traitor than before; and, besides, is it quite manly?
“I am to sit with him this afternoon,” she answers in a tone of caustic discontent, “and convince that idiot Féodorovna that he is not being poisoned or starved. It will only be for to-day,” she adds, more as a satisfaction to her own conscience than as an explanation in the least called for by him. “And to-morrow you will both be back!”
“Even if we are, you must not hurry home!” replies Rupert, with that complete unselfishness which his family has grown so used to as barely to be aware of. “I am so boomed just now, that I can run the show without you for an indefinite time. He actually asked my opinion this morning,” opening his eyes wide and smiling; then, growing grave again, “and I always feel that we none of us can do enough to make that poor chap feel at his ease with us!”
She looks up at him in a dumb appreciation of his delicacy and feeling, that has no pleasure, nay, a leaven of unmistakable pain in it; and looking realizes that he is paler than his never high-coloured wont. Admirably as he disguises it, is it a sacrifice that he is making? Does he divine?
“You look as white as a sheet,” she says, with a sudden impulse to know the worst. “What has happened to you?”