“Would you mind very much staying on here for two or three days, even for a week, if necessary?”
“No, no.”
He smiled.
“A whole week of Liverpool!” he said.
“How many years have you been here?”
“A good many. I’m almost losing count.”
When he was gone Lady Ingleton sat for a long while before the fire.
The sad influence of the blackness of rainy Liverpool had lifted from her. Her impulse had received a welcome which had warmed her.
“I love that man,” she thought. “Carey would love him too.”
He had said very little, and how loyal he had been in his silence, how loyal to the woman she had attacked. In words he had not defended her, but somehow he had conveyed to Lady Ingleton a sense of his protective love and immense pity for the woman who had been bereft of her child. How he had conveyed this she could not have said. But as she sat there before the fire she was aware that, since Father Robertson’s visit, she felt differently about Dion Leith’s wife. Mysteriously she began to feel the sorrow of the woman as well as, and side by side with, the sorrow of the man.