Page:Delight - de la Roche - 1926.djvu/65

 He sprang to his feet, his face set and white. "If I do the other, I'll be sick, do you hear? You'll have to get someone else to do the other."

"You do it this minute," she persisted.

"By thunder, I won't!" He folded his arms across his chest.

"Then you don't like me." Her lashes were sticking together with tears. "You've turned against me, Jimmy."

"Like you! Like you! That's the trouble. I like you so well I'd do anything reasonable for you. But this ain't reasonable. It's unnatural, and it's making me sick. P-please don't ask me, Delight." He made a pillow of his bent arm and laid his face against it. He, too, was crying.

Kirke and Lovering had come up to their room together after supper. Lovering was writing his weekly letter home to his wife. His broad figure bent over the shaky little table, his fist grasping the pen so firmly that the nib sputtered ink at each period, he threw himself into his task. His lips moved as he wrote as though he were indeed holding converse with his wife, and when he frowned and nodded, it seemed to Kirke that he was arguing with her, or explaining why he was not sending more money.

Kirke was tilted in a chair, his feet resting on another, his pipe in his mouth. He was supposedly reading a daily paper he had taken from the reading-room, but his gaze wandered from Lovering to the window from which he could see the flagged side entrance and pump of the house, the yard and poultry runs, and, just up the street, a broadside view of The British American House, the rival hotel. There was not a bedroom in The Duke of York