If she should wilt under this prolonged obligation of
nursing, her years openly advertise their number, and she grow faded,
_passee_, a woman who visibly has outlived her prime? She could have
shaken the insufficiently dying General in his bed! Yes, insufficiently
dying--for, in heaven's name, let him make up his mind and that
speedily--get well and make himself useful, or veritably and finally
depart before, for the preservation of her good looks, it was too late.
"I met Sir Charles Verity at the station," Wace went on. "He was coming
out of the first class _salle d'attente_. He stopped and spoke to me,
enquired for cousin Fred; but his manner was peculiar, autocratic to a
degree. He made me feel in the way, feel that he was annoyed at my being
there and wanted to get rid of me."
"Imagination, my dear Marshall. In all probability he wasn't thinking
about you one way or the other, but merely about his own affairs, his
own--as Carteret reports--remarkably clever book.--But why, I wonder, was
he at the station so early?"
Henrietta stood turning the folded newspaper about and idly scanning the
head-lines, while the wind, entering by the open casements at the end of
the corridor, lifted and fluttered the light blue gauze scarf she wore
round her shoulders over her white frilled morning gown.
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