‘I wish,’ said Sheila almost pathetically, and yet with a faint quaver of resignation, ‘I wish it could be said that the man of the house sometimes has the heart. Think it over, Arthur!’
Sheila, with her husband’s luncheon tray, brought also her farewells. Lawford surveyed, not without a faint, shy stirring of incredulity, the superbly restrained presence. He stood before her dry-lipped, inarticulate, a schoolboy caught redhanded in the shabbiest of offences.
‘It is your wish then that I go, Arthur?’ she said pleadingly.
He handed her her money without a word.
‘Very well, Arthur; if you won’t take it,’ she said. ‘I should scarcely have thought this the occasion for mere pride.’
‘The tenth,’ she continued, as she squeezed the envelope into her purse, with only the least hardening of voice, ‘although I daresay you have not troubled to remember it—the tenth will be the eighteenth anniversary of our wedding-day. It makes parting, however advisable, and though only for the few days we should think nothing of in happier circumstances, a little harder to bear. But there, all will come right. You will see things in a different light, perhaps. Words may wound, but time will heal.’ But even as she now looked closely into his colourless sunken face some distant memory seemed to well up irresistibly—the memory of eyes just as ingenuous, and as unassuming that even in claiming her love had expressed only their stolid unworthiness.
‘Did you know it? have you seen it?’ she said, stooping forward a little. ‘I believe in spite of all....’ He gazed on solemnly, almost owlishly, out of his fading mask.
‘Wait till Mr Bethany tells you; you will believe it perhaps from him.’ He saw the grey-gloved hand a little reluctantly lifted towards him.
‘Good-bye, Sheila,’ he said, and turned mechanically back to the window.
She hesitated, listening to a small far-away voice that kept urging her with an almost frog-like pertinacity to do, to say something, and yet as stubbornly would not say what; and she was gone.