"If you promise, I know you'll keep it. And then I shall want another promise—two more, in fact. I want you to promise not to worry, and you must promise not to feel any pain. Will you do that, sweetheart? I've come up all the way from Melton, you know."
She withdrew her hand, and I saw that her face had become suddenly pale and that her eyes were tightly closed.
"I can't promise that, David."
His voice caressed her, as though he were talking to a child.
"I think you can, darling. Do you remember when you sprained your ankle, skating at Crowley Court, and you started to cry with the pain and I said I wouldn't carry you back to the house until you'd promised to stop crying and not to let the ankle hurt any more? You promised quickly enough then, and it's much more important now. If you'll promise that now, I'll do anything you like."
She smiled wistfully a second time, then drew his head down to her own and whispered something. I heard him say, "You won't. I swear you won't, Sonia." Then he drew himself upright, waved his hand and walked to the door.
I sat with him in the library, while he attacked a belated luncheon and plied me with questions about his wife. Her whispered request, he told me, was that she might, if possible, be kept from seeing the child when it was born, and on this he hung a string of questions to find out what steps we had taken to secure the best doctors and nurses, when the birth was expected, whether anyone else knew.
"We've told no one," I assured him, "since you asked us not to."
"I told Burgess," he said. There was a long silence. "I—told him everything.... I mean, one does with Burgess. I found it wasn't news to him. George had told him—weeks ago.... One does with Burgess," he repeated, smiling.