"Hello, old girl! that headache's better; the stroll has done it good."
She wondered if it was the stroll or the refreshment he had taken; she had already discovered that stimulants made of him another man; even after one bottle of ale he was not the same man he had been before. Her cue was to ignore the part which alcohol might have played in affecting a cure.
"I am so glad you're better, dear; I know what it is to have a headache; I believe I've got one. Please mayn't I go out on to the common now?"
He laughed at her, lifting her off her feet.
"I'll carry you," he said.
And he did; out of the house, across the road, not putting her down till he had borne her on to the grass; then, running the risk of what eyes there might be about to see, she gave him a kiss to pay for porterage. Presently they were, outwardly, on proper honeymooning terms again, each making a gallant, and not wholly unsuccessful, effort to shut out from actual vision the ghosts which kept step at their sides. When they had retired to rest Herbert Nash said to his wife--
"Do you know, I think I have had about enough of Littlehampton; what do you say?"
"I say what you say; only the question is, wherever shall we go to? and when?"
"There are heaps of places we can go to; and as for when, we can leave this to-morrow. I'll think it over."
He thought it over; all through the night he lay thinking, with wide-open eyes, and so did she. But they did not leave on the morrow, nor the next day. And on the morning of the third day there came a letter addressed to "Mr. and Mrs. Herbert Nash," which Mr. Nash, being first at the breakfast table, opened. It ran--