"Thank you. It's only a matter of time, as I gather. But a bad job for him till he gets his sight again."
"He will, I suppose, in the end?"
"Oh yes—in the end. Sir Coupland is cautious, of course. But I don't fancy he's really uneasy. His sight might come back suddenly, he said, at any moment. Of course, he believes his eyesight will come back. Only meanwhile he wants—it was a phrase of his own—to keep all the excruciation for his own private enjoyment. That's what he said!"
"I see. Of course, that makes a difference. And you think Sir Coupland thinks he will get all right again?"
Mr. Pellew says he does think so, reassuringly. "It has always struck me as peculiar," says he, "that Tim's family ... I beg pardon—I should have said the Earl's. But you see I remember him as a kid—we are cousins, you know—and his sisters always called him Tim.... Well, I mean the family here, you know, seem to know so little of the Torrenses. Lady Gwen doesn't seem to have recognised this chap in the Park."
"I believe she has never seen him. He has been a great deal abroad, you know."
"Yes, he's been at German Universities, and games of that sort."
"Is that your third cigar, Mr. Pellew?"
"No—second. Come, I say, Miss Dickenson, two's not much...."
But her remark was less a tobacco-crusade than a protest against too abrupt a production of family history by a family friend. Mr. Pellew felt confident it would come, though; and it did, at about the third whiff of the new cigar.