When tea was over Simeon pushed back his chair and was about to stalk from the room, when he remembered that French was his guest, and halted to let him go out first, but when French waited beside him to let Deena pass, an expression of impatience crossed her husband’s face, as if the precious half seconds he could so ill spare from his work, in order to reach conclusions, were being sacrificed to dancing master ceremonials.
Deena sat sewing till Stephen came to bid her good-night.
“I think it is all arranged,” he said, but without the joyousness of his first announcement. He had, perhaps, lost a little of his interest in his friend, Ponsonby, since the incident at the tea table.
Deena, with a woman’s instinct, guessed at his feelings, and made no effort to detain him. She was tired and discouraged, and would gladly have gone to bed when their guest departed, except for a suspicion that Simeon would want to talk things over with her, in spite of his seeming indifference. She was not mistaken. In ten minutes he came into the parlor and threw himself wearily on the sofa.
“Deena,” he said, and his tone was kind, “if I should go away for six months, do you think you could manage without me?”
“I am sure I could,” she answered, cheerfully, “and I want to say to you, now that you have opened the subject, that you must not let my expenses stand in your way. I know, of course, if you give up your college work, part of your salary would naturally pass to the person who, for the time, undertakes your duties, and I have been thinking that a simple plan would be to rent this house.”
The idea was not quite agreeable to Simeon—the old house was part of himself; he had been born there; his love for his mother overflowed into every rickety chair; but the common-sense commercial value of the scheme made him regard Deena with revived respect.
“It is hardly practicable,” he said. “In the first place, it is too old-fashioned to attract, and, in the second, there is no market for furnished houses at Harmouth.”
“Mrs. Barnes would take it, I fancy,” said Deena. “She is the mother of the student who was hurt last week in the football match. She is trying everywhere to find a furnished house so that she can take care of him and yet let him stay on here. I think we could rent it, Simeon, and I should need so little—so very little to keep me while you are gone.”
He took off his spectacles and sat up.