She hesitated on the threshold. Her instinct of order forbade her to leave the despatch box open and the book trailing about the floor. She would lock the book up in it and put the key in one of Alexis’s pockets. But when, having picked up the small leather box and carried it to the desk, she prepared to do this, a name written on a common piece of paper half in print—an official form—stared brutally at her. And there were others underneath. And reading them she learned the complete official history of John Briggs, Able Seaman, from the time of his joining the Armoured Column in Russia to his discharge, after his mine-sweeper had been torpedoed in the North Sea.
Olivia, her dark hair falling about the shoulders of her heliotrope wrap, sat in her husband’s writing-chair, staring at him with tragic eyes as he slept, his brown hair carelessly sweeping his pale brow, and kept a ghastly vigil.
CHAPTER XVI
BLAISE OLIFANT sat over his work in the room which once, for want of a better name, the late Mr. Gale called his study; but it was a room transformed to studious use. The stuffed trout and the large scale-map of the neighbourhood and the country auctioneer’s carelessly bestowed oddments had been replaced by cases of geological specimens and bookshelves filled with a specialist’s library. The knee-hole writing-desk, with its cigarette-burned edge, had joined the rest of the old lares and penates in honourable storage, and a long refectory-table, drawn across the window overlooking the garden, and piled with papers, microscopes, and other apparatus, reigned in its stead. Olifant loved the room’s pleasant austerity. It symbolized himself, his aims and his life’s limitations. A fire burned in the grate, for it was a cold, raw morning, and, outside, miserable rain defaced the April day.
He smoked a pipe as he corrected proofs, so absorbed in the minute and half-mechanical task that he did not hear the door open and the quiet entrance of a maid.
“Mr. Triona, sir.”
The words cut through the silence so that he started and swung round in his chair.
“Mr. Triona? Where?”
“In the dining-room.”
“Show him in here.”