“But it is impossible, Lucy,” said the young husband gravely. “And that being so, it is well for us to remember that, could I get it, it might do me no real good.”
“But you can get it,” Lucy cried, almost passionately. “Of what good are our savings, small as they are, if they are not to help you to—to recover health,” she said with a gasp.
“Lucy, my dear,” said Charles Challoner, putting his arm about her and drawing her close to him, “could it do me good to go away, knowing that every day of the holiday brought want nearer to you and the boy and myself? Would not all the good I might gain be undone if I had to return home and begin life again under the hardest and worst conditions, struggling for each day’s bread, dreading lest another attack might leave you not only a widow, Lucy, but penniless, perhaps in debt?”
“Ah, I own all that, Charlie,” she admitted, gently withdrawing herself from his clasp that she might gaze straight into his eyes, “but I have thought it all out, and planned everything, so that this shall not be. You must arrange for a year’s leave of absence from your office; I think the firm will give you that—you leaving your salary to be paid to whoso shall temporarily undertake your work.”
“And am I to lose the little business I am gathering up for myself—my three or four private clients?” he asked piteously, as if he felt himself already yielding to the sweet dominance of her will.
“Transfer them to your locum tenens, too,” she said, “or even lose them; something may have to be sacrificed. Then from our little hoard take what will suffice for a thoroughly long sea-voyage—there must be no doing it in a half-and-half way. And leave the rest in the bank.”
“The rest in the bank!” echoed poor Charlie. “There won’t be much to leave after paying for a long journey for you and me and the boy. And it will cost something to keep the house going while we are away, or we should lose dreadfully if we tried to sell leasehold and furniture at a pinch.”
“Dearest old boy!” said his wife, laying her cheek upon his. “Why will he interrupt? and why will he give himself needless worries? I am to stay at home with the boy and to keep the house going. Did he think I was to be dragged all over the world—I and our poor little pet?” (She could speak so, never flinching, while shocks of pain shook her heart at the thought that no such journey was possible, but only this awful loneliness of which she would not dare to begin to think, until Charlie should be fairly gone, and it was too late to call him back!) “And I’ll whisper it to you, Charlie, that just as I added three guineas to my five shillings this afternoon, so I trust when you come back you will find something—not much maybe, and yet something—added to the nest egg you will leave in the bank. For, Charlie, at the St. George’s Institute, they are prepared to forgive me for deserting them for you, and they will take me on again as a teacher, and Mr. Mapp says he thinks my sketches will sell very well, and he advises me to try for a little book-illustrating.”
“And what will become of Hugh, while you are at the Institute?” asked Charlie.
“I have thought it all out,” she answered. “He shall go to that nice kindergarten near the church. Its hours are the same as at the Institute. I shall take him when I go, and call for him on my return.”