He looked at his wife, and his floating, near-sighted eyes grew dim with tender pain, and the tendril-like movement of his fingers increased.
He forgot St. George Mivart, and all at once it occurred to him why he had come.
“Poor old boy, his punishment is horribly out of proportion to his deserts,” thought the rector, as, in the pause that followed, he caught snatches of the low-toned talk of the women, with Gwen’s name entering largely into it, and saw Mrs. Waring’s face fixed on his own wife with pathetic shy yearning, not veering round to her husband with covert eagerness, as it used to do.
Mr. Fellowes caught himself echoing the other husband’s sigh, and he laughed as the absurdity of the situation struck him.
“This must be stopped,” he thought, “it grows mawkish. I wonder if they have forgotten to feed—more than likely. Ruth, have you asked Mrs. Waring if she has lunched?”
“Indeed I haven’t!” she cried, “I don’t know what I can have been thinking about.”
“Oh, please, Mrs. Fellowes,” stammered the little woman, then her eyes turned towards their magnet.
Mr. Waring was at her side and with her hand in his, with a speed that made Mrs. Fellowes gasp.
“The fact is, Mrs. Fellowes,” he explained heroically, “we were both a little forgetful, we—we—” he paused painfully and gulped. “Ah!——I”—
He repented the word sadly, it was the first time his conscience had forced him to separate the two, and it hurt him. “Yes, I was much absorbed in my work—and my wife, I think she is not very well.”
“Ah, dearest, I doubt it. I thought some quinine might be beneficial, Mrs. Fellowes. In fact, that was the primary motive of our call.”
“Give her some claret for the present, and make her eat something, wine and meat are as good as quinine any day.”
Mrs. Waring was the most docile creature breathing, she swallowed obediently everything set before her, when suddenly a little tremble ran all down her and shook her gently, and she let her fork drop with a little clash.
She had caught sight just over the sideboard of one of Brydon’s sketches of Gwen, that she had sent Mrs. Fellowes.
Her husband had not seen the picture, so he only pressed her knife hand gently, and murmured, “Nerves!”
She went back obediently to her meal, and if they had given her the whole of a chicken and a quart of claret, she would have swallowed both without a murmur, so long as they let her get finished and go close up to that picture.