"You might try, kitten," is the reply, not given sanguinely. And Sally goes off, benevolent. "Even when your trousers are tied up with string, a fog's a fog," says she to herself.
"I knoo our friend Lund first of all...." Thus the Major, nodding towards the bedroom door.... "Why, God bless my soul, ma'am, I knew Lund first of all, forty-six years ago in Delhi. Forty—six—years! And all that time, if you believe me, he's been the same obstinate moole. Never takin' a precaution about anythin', nor listening to a word of advice!" This is about as far as he can go without a choke. Rosalind goes into the next room to get a tumbler of water. The nurse, who is sitting by the fire, nods towards the bed, and Rosalind goes close to it to hear. "What is it, dear?" She speaks to the invalid as to a little child.
"Isn't that Old Jack choking? I know his choke. What does he come out for in weather like this? What does he mean? Send him back.... No, send him in here." The nurse puts in a headshake as protest. But for all that, Sally finds, when she returns, that the two veterans are contending together against their two enemies, bronchitis and asthma, with the Intelligence Department sadly interrupted, and the enemy in possession of all the advantageous points.
"He oughtn't to try to talk," says Rosalind. "But he will." She and Sally and the nurse sit on in the fog-bound front room. The gas-lights have no heart in them, and each wears a nimbus. Rosalind wishes Gerry would return, aloud. Sally is buoyant about him; he's all right, trust him! What about the everlasting young beggar?
"I persuaded Mrs. Kindred," says Sally. "And we looked outside for him, and he'd gone."
"Fancy a woman being named Kindred!"
"When people are so genteel one can believe anything! But what do you think the boy's name is?... Chancellorship! Isn't that queer? She knows him—says he's always about in the
neighbourhood. He sleeps in the mews behind Great Toff House."
Her mother isn't listening. She rises for a moment to hear what she may of how the talk in the next room goes on; and then, coming back, says again she wishes Gerry was safe indoors, and Sally again says, "Oh, he's all right!" The confidence these two have in one another makes them a couple apart—a sort of league.
What Mrs. Fenwick heard a scrap of in the next room would have been, but for the alarums and excursions of the two enemies aforementioned, a consecutive conversation as follows: