“Pained? No.”
“Then you do care?”
She was silent. But she lifted her eyes to him and he read there what she could not speak. With a sudden impulse he threw his arm around her, dripping as she was, and kissed her. Then she broke away and fled to her room.
Raine's first act on reaching his room was to summon a servant and send Katherine a glass of cherry-brandy, which he poured from a flask he had brought with him for mountaineering chances, together with a scribbled line: “Drink this, at once.”
Then he changed his dripping garments for comfortable flannels, and went in search of his father. But the old man, though he smiled at Raine's account of his adventure, was still depressed.
“It will be wretched without you,” he said. “Yet you must go away for a time. Make it as short as you can, Raine. I shall think in the meantime of a way out of the difficulty.”
“Couldn't you take Felicia somewhere?” suggested Raine. “To Lucerne. You might start a few days before my return. I must come back for a little while. Afterwards, I might join you, when you have parted from Felicia, and go back to Oxford with you.”
“I will see,” replied the old man a little wearily.
“Poor old dad,” said Raine.
“Man is ever poor,” said his father. “He will never learn the lesson of life. Even with one foot in the grave he plants the other upon the ladder of illusion.”