Country life -- England -- Fiction; England -- Social life and customs -- Fiction
He stole a look at her. She was looking as if the long journey had
tried her severely. He had never thought of her as getting old, but now
he did.
"Yes, I will rest," she said. "There is nothing else to do. Do you
know I haven’t been in London for twenty years?"
She was looking out of the window of the taxi-cab, at the London streets
beginning to fill up with the day’s traffic. She wanted a respite. The
innumerable questions he had to ask of her must wait.
He breakfasted with her in her private sitting-room, where they could
talk afterwards, if she was so minded, before he went off to his work.
She came to it refreshed, and was ready for him when they were alone
together.
"Tell me about the girl," she said. "I know she must be good and sweet,
and I know that she has helped Harry through his difficult time."
"I can’t tell you more than that," he said, "except that she’s
beautiful, and exactly what you’d want her to be, except perhaps in the
matter of her birth. I don’t say anything against her upbringing, as it
has left her what she is. But you seem to know everything about her
already. I’ve known you for a good many years, but you’re always full
of surprises. The greatest you’ve ever given me is when you wired that
you’d always known. You must have thought of me as a pretty large size
in fools during some of the conversations we used to have. How did you
find out, and when?"
She smiled at him. "I think you might have guessed that I knew," she
said, "when I let you come to London to find out about Harry, and to get
a message to him. I didn’t particularly want you to know then, because,
to tell you the truth, I did rather hope that it wouldn’t continue. I
saw that it had done him no harm, but it still might have been nothing
more than a pretty boy and girl love-making. Then I shouldn’t have
wanted him to know that I had surprised his secret."
"No," he said. "You showed infinite wisdom, as you always do. But tell
me how you knew."
"Something had happened to Harry. I think I must have guessed it the
very first time he met her, or at least when he found out he loved her,
and I think that must have been the first time he met her, or why
shouldn’t he have told us? I was always on the lookout for changes in
him, and you see I knew the signs of this change. Harry is much more
like my dear husband was, when he was young, than he is like his father.
It was only that kind of love that could have made him so happy and so
silent and so absorbed. Oh, I knew very soon, and of course I put two
and two together, and knew who it was. Afterwards, little pieces of
evidence came to me, but I didn’t try to seek them, and I didn’t need
them. Nobody guessed they had met. Nobody knew at Royd, except me—and
you."
He laughed ruefully, and told her how and when he had found out.
"Perhaps you guessed even before I did," he said. "Were you annoyed
with me for keeping it to myself?"
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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