“They are very incomplete,” he hinted; “but I am glad you are disposed to be kind about them.”
They had dropped into chairs at the usual conversational distance, and he sat regarding her with a look which almost confessed that he did not understand.
“I suppose you had an execrable passage,” Judith volunteered, with sociable emphasis. “I can imagine what it must have been, as far as Aden, with the monsoon well on.”
“Execrable,” he repeated. He had come to a conclusion. It was part of her moral conception of their situation that he should begin his love-making over again. She would not tolerate their picking it up and going on with it. At least that was her attitude. He wondered, indulgently, how long she would be able to keep it.
“And Calcutta? I suppose you left it steaming?”
“I hardly know. I was there only a couple of days before the mail left. Almost the whole of July I have been on tour.”
“Oh—really?” said Mrs. Church. Her face assumed the slight sad impenetrability with which we give people to understand that they are trespassing upon ground hallowed by the association of grief. Ancram observed, with irritation, that she almost imposed silence upon him for a moment. Her look suggested to him that if he made any further careless allusions she might break into tears.
“Dear me!” Judith said softly at last, pouring out the tea, “how you bring everything back to me!”
He thought of saying boldly that he had come to bring her back to everything, but for some reason he refrained.
“Not unpleasantly, I hope?” He had an instant’s astonishment at finding such a commonplace upon his lips. He had thought of this in poems for months.