Mrs. Church laughed frankly. “Poor Dr. James!” she exclaimed. “My husband is double-dyed in febrifuge to-day.”
Ancram took the privilege—it was one he enjoyed—of gently rebuking her. “It is one of those common, urgent needs of the people,” he said, “that His Honour so intimately understands.”
Judith looked at him with a sudden sweet humility in her eyes. “You are quite right,” she returned. “I sometimes think that nobody knows him as you do. Certainly,” she added, in a lower tone, as the two fell back, “nobody has more of his confidence, more of his dependence.”
“I don’t know,” Ancram answered vaguely. “Do you really think so? I don’t know.”
“I am sure of it.”
He looked straight before him in silence, irritated in his sensitive morality—the morality which forbade him to send a Government chuprassie on a private errand, or to write to his relations in England on office paper. A curve in the walk showed them Rhoda Daye, standing alone on the sward, beside a bush in crimson-and-orange flower, intently examining a spray. Almost involuntarily they paused, and Ancram turned his eyes upon Mrs. Church with the effect of asking her what he should do, what he must do.
“Go!” she said; and then, as if it were a commonplace: “I think Miss Daye wants you. I will overtake the others.”
She thought he left her very willingly, and hurried on with the conviction that, like everything else, it would come right—quite right—in the end. She was very happy if in any way she had helped it to come right—so happy that she longed to be alone with her sensations, and revolted with all her soul against the immediate necessity of Sir William Scott and the St. Georges. To be for a few hours quite alone, unseen and unknown, in the heart of some empty green wilderness like this, would help her, she knew, to rationalise her satisfaction. “My dear boy,” she said, with nervous patience, as Captain Thrush appeared in search of her, “did you think I had fallen into a tank? Do go and take care of the other people.” An aide-de-camp was not a serious impediment to reflection, but at the moment Judith would have been distressed by the attendance of her own shadow, if it were too perceptible.
Ancram crossed over to Rhoda, with his antipathy to the Lieutenant-Governor sensibly aggravated by the fact that his wife took an interest in him—an appreciative interest. It was out of harmony, Ancram felt vaguely, that she should do this—it jarred. He had so admired her usual attitude of pale, cool, sweet tolerance toward John Church—had so approved it. That attitude had been his solace in thinking about her in her unique position and with her rare temperament. To suppose her counting up her husband’s virtues, weighing them, doing justice to them, tinged her with the commonplace, and disturbed him.
“That’s a curious thing,” he said to Rhoda.