Page:Twilight Sleep (Grosset).pdf/169

RV 161

BELIEVE it's the first time in a month that I've heard Nona laugh," Stanley Heuston said with a touch of irony—or was it simply envy?

Nona was still in the whirlpool of her laugh. She struggled to its edge only to be caught back, with retrospective sobs and gasps, into its central coil. "It was too screamingly funny," she flung at them out of the vortex.

She was perched sideways, as her way was, on the arm of the big chintz sofa in Arthur Wyant's sitting-room. Wyant was stretched out in his usual armchair, behind a crumby messy tea-table, on the other side of which sat his son and Stanley Heuston.

"She didn't hesitate for more than half a second—just long enough to catch my eye—then round she jerked, grabbed hold of her last word and fitted it into a beautiful new appeal to the Mothers. Oh—oh—oh! If you could have seen them!"

"I can." Jim's face suddenly became broad, mild and earnestly peering. He caught up a pair of his father's eye-glasses, adjusted them to his blunt nose, and murmured in a soft feminine drawl: "Mrs.