By the door he stopped, dropping his voice. "Be patient with my sister to-night. I am going to tell her about my affair. It will distress her very much. Assure her that it is unimportant, will soon be right. Poor Meg!"
He pressed Henry's arm and went forward alone into the dark house.
But how tiresome it is! That very same evening Henry, filled with noble thoughts and a longing for self-sacrifice, was as deeply and as childishly irritated by the events of the evening and by Lady Bell-Hall as he had ever been. In the first place, when he was dressing and had just found a clean handkerchief and was ready to go downstairs, the button-hole of his white shirt burst under his collar and he was forced to undress again and was ten minutes late downstairs.
He saw at once that Duncombe had told his sister the news. Henry had been prepared to show a great tenderness, a fine nobility, a touching fatherliness to the poor frightened lady. But Lady Bell-Hall was not frightened, she was merely querulous, with a drop of moisture at the end of her nose and a cross look down the table at Henry as though he were to-night just more than she could bear. It was also hard that on this night of all nights there should be that minced beef that Henry always found it difficult to encounter. It was not so much that the mince was cooked badly, and what was worse, meanly and baldly, but that it stood as a kind of symbol for all that was mistaken in Lady Bell-Hall's housekeeping.
She was a bad housekeeper, and thoroughly complacent over her incompetence, and it was this incompetence that irritated Henry. Somehow to-night there should have been a gracious offering of the very best the place could afford, with some silence, some resignation, some gentle evidence of affection. But it was not so. Duncombe was his old cynical self, with no sign whatever of the afternoon's mood.
Only for a moment after dinner in the little grey drawing-room, when Duncombe had left them alone and Henry was seated reading Couperas and Lady Bell-Hall opposite to him was knitting her interminable stockings, was there a flash of something. She looked up suddenly and across at him.
"I learn from my brother that he has told you?" she said, blinking her eyes that were always watering at him.