II

He might have gone out and paid the fare for her, but he stayed where he was, in the doorway, thinking with beatific relief that after all nothing had “happened” in the family.

“Ah!” he said, in the most ordinary, complacent, quite undisturbed tone, “I was just beginning to wonder where you’d got to.  We’ve been back about five minutes, Sissie and I, and Sissie’s gone to bed.  I really don’t believe she knows you were out.”

Mrs. Prohack came urgently towards him, pushing the door to behind her with a careless loud bang.  The bang might waken the entire household, but Mrs. Prohack did not care.  Mrs. Prohack kissed him without a word.  He possessed in his heart a barometric scale of her kisses, and this was a set-fair kiss, a kiss with a somewhat violent beginning and a reluctant close.  Then she held her cheek for him to kiss.  Both cheek and lips were freshly cold from the night air.  Mr. Prohack was aware of an immense, romantic felicity.  And he immediately became flippant, not aloud, but secretly, to hide himself from himself.

He thought: 

“It’s a positive fact that I’ve been kissing this girl of a woman for a quarter of a century, and she’s fat.”

But beneath his flippancy and beneath his felicity there was a lancinating qualm, which, if he had expressed it he would have expressed thus: 

“If anything did happen to her, it would be the absolute ruin of me.”

The truth was that his felicity frightened him.  Never before had he been seriously concerned for her well-being.  The reaction from grave alarm lighted up the interior of his mysterious soul with a revealing flash of unique intensity.

“What are all these lights burning for?” she murmured.  Lights were indeed burning everywhere.  He had been in a mood to turn on but not to turn off.

“Oh!” he said, “I was just wandering about.”

“I’ll go straight upstairs,” she said, trying to be as matter-of-fact as her Arthur appeared to be.

When he had leisurely set the whole of the ground-floor to rights, he followed her.  She was waiting for him in the boudoir.  She had removed her hat and mantle, and lighted one of the new radiators, and was sitting on the sofa.

“There came a telegram from Charlie,” she began.  “I was crossing the hall just as the boy reached the door.  So I opened the door myself.  It was from Charlie to say that he would be at the Grand Babylon Hotel to-night.”

“Charlie!  The Grand Babylon!...  Not Buckingham Palace.”  Eve ignored his crude jocularity.

“It seems I ought to have received it early in the afternoon.  I was so puzzled I didn’t know what to do—­I just put my things on and went off to the hotel at once.  It wasn’t till after I was in the taxi that I remembered I ought to have told the servants where I was going.  That’s why I hurried back.  I wanted to get back before you did.  Charlie suggested telephoning from the hotel, but I wouldn’t let him on any account.”