“I’m ready if you are,” he replied. “I’d like to see old Chip again myself. It means the ten-thirty from Paddington, you know.”
“What will the family say?” Judy asked him. “Oh, well, let them say it! I knew I could count on you, Noel!”
* * * * * *
Once in the swift and inexorable train, Judy was assailed with doubts. What was she doing? Should she have let things take their own course? Would it have been wiser to have stayed at home, and to have written Chip a letter?
Noel, observing her restlessness and guessing the cause, told her he had won five pounds at bridge the day before, and that if she wanted to pull the emergency cord and get out, he’d pay. But when she asked him point blank, “Tell me, do you think I’m acting like a fool?” he replied, “No, like a human being,” and she felt calmer then and read her magazine.
But panic overwhelmed her once more in the jolting Ford with flapping side curtains that took them from the inn in West Perranpool to Cliff Cottage, where Chip lived.
“Why did we come?” she cried.
“Because,” said Noel, the comforter, “I wanted to see Chip again before I went to Germany, and I brought you with me. And besides, I saw his doctor again the other day, and he said that what Chip needed more than anything was cheering up. He said he’d been rather depressed since the accident. So stop agonizing about it.”
She stopped agonizing after that, and watched the thin rain of early spring that slanted steadily down from a darkening sky. The bleak landscape had a peculiar charm. So, too, had the lonely, white cottages they passed, their undrawn curtains showing fiery painted walls, for dusk was upon them. They climbed a little hill and pulled up sharply at the door of a low house that looked at the sea from its dormer windows. Lights burned there, too. The driver of the Ford had assured them that Major Crosby would be in, because, he said, there was never anything to go out for. They told him to wait, and knocked at the door.
Chip opened it himself. It was just dark enough to make it difficult for him to recognize them, but when he did he was almost overcome with surprise and pleasure. He stammered. He shook hands twice over. He shut the door too quickly behind them—as though, Judy thought, he were afraid they might go out again—and caught her skirt in it, at which they all laughed. He pushed every chair in the room toward the fire, as if they were capable of sitting in more than one apiece.