“Never say that women are not practical!” laughed Mr. Challoner. “While I am only thinking of sentiment, the wifie has gone on to the shillings! But ah, Lucy dear, don’t think I don’t know that you want the shillings only for the sake of the sentiment!”
They sat together hand in hand. They had been married seven years, and they were on the eve of separation. Both hearts were full of feelings to which they dared not give utterance. One must not stir a brimming cup lest it overflow.
“I vote we go to Deal!” cried Charlie at last.
“Isn’t it rather an east windy place for an invalid?” asked Lucy.
“But I’m not an invalid, and am not going to pass as one,” he said gaily. “I’m a fellow starting on a sea-voyage! No, no, Lucy, don’t doom me to some sheltered cubby hole of a ‘resort,’ where half the population are in bath-chairs and the other half in respirators. It would give us the blues! If you’ll let us go to Deal, I’ll promise to be very good,” he went on with his indomitable boyishness. “I’ll only go out when you say I may, and I’ll come in the minute you say I must. Only let us go there!”
In the depths of his heart lay the secret thought that to go to any place where consumptives are wont to congregate, would inevitably fill Lucy’s mind with dire forebodings, besides exposing her to the depressing influences of the conventional “sympathy” or forced “hopefulness” which emanate from well-meaning landladies and others trained by experience to regard their habitat as one of the last stages on life’s journey.
All the next day Lucy hurriedly made her little preparations for the trip. She said to Charlie that, if Deal suited him, and if they got snug apartments, they might stay on till the very end, so that he need only use their own house to rest and sleep in on his way through London to the north.
“As for any sea-going things you want—lockers, waterproofs, and so on—we can get them at Deal,” she said.
Only when all was in readiness for their start, while the cab which was to take them to the station actually stood at the door, did she post a letter to Mrs. Brand, giving the first intimation of their present move and of Charlie’s future journey.
“We have had it in view for some time,” she wrote, for it was impossible for Lucy Challoner to be inferentially untruthful, “but it was only decided the day before yesterday.”