“Are you not at rest just now?” she asked, and added, even before he shook his head: “But no! You are overworked; your face shows it.”
“Mary said so this morning,” he answered; “but if my looks pity me, as Peakshire folk would say, I feel fit and well.”
“Where is my Mary?” she asked. “Why have you not brought her?”
“Mary has flown down to Hayshire,” he said, “on the wings of the Portsmouth Express. One of the crippled children at the Home was to be operated on, under chloroform, for the removal of a portion of diseased hip-bone; and though my wife shrank from the ordeal of seeing pain, even dulled by the anæsthetic, she felt it was her duty to be upon the spot.”
“Dear Mary!” she said, and if Dunoisse had seen her face he would no longer have thought it lacking in warmth and color: “True, good, noble woman.”
Bertham answered, with feeling in his own face and voice:
“The dearest, living!... the noblest I ever knew—but one, Ada!”
She passed the words as though she had not heard, and said, with the soft, clear laugh that had music in it for the ears of those who loved her, and this man was one of the many:
“Husnuggle was made so happy by your not forgetting her, poor good soul!”
“Her face conjured up Wraye Rest,” he said, “and the yew-tree gateway between the park and the garden; and the green terraces with the apple-espaliers and the long borders of lavender-bushes; and Darth down at the bottom of the deep valley, foaming over her bed of limestone rock, and the steep paths down to the trout-pools that were easier to tread than the slippery ways of Diplomacy.”