Page:The Other House (London, William Heinemann, 1896), Volume 1.djvu/78

64 impressed. "You think that will make her worse?"

"Why, arranging everything as if she's going to die!" Tony sprang up afresh; his trouble was obvious and he fell into the restless pacing that had been his resource all the morning.

His interlocutress watched his agitation. "Mayn't it be that if you do just that she'll, on the contrary, immediately find herself better?"

Tony wandered, again scratching his head. "From the spirit of contradiction? I'll do anything in life that will make her happy, or just simply make her quiet: I'll treat her demand as intensely reasonable even, if it isn't better to treat it as an ado about nothing. But it stuck in my crop to lend myself, that way, to a death-bed solemnity. Heaven deliver us!" Half irritated and half anxious, suffering from his tenderness a twofold effect, he dropped into another seat with his hands in his pockets and his long legs thrust out.

"Does she wish it very solemn?" Rose asked.

"She's in dead earnest, poor darling. She wants a promise on my sacred honour—a vow of the most portentous kind."