times that sum to him tomorrow. On other nights Colonel Chase usually stood for a long time in front of the fire-place when the rubbers were over, richly rattling coppers in his trousers' pocket, and giving them a few hints about declarations to take up to bed, but now there was no chink of bullion to endorse his wisdom, and he made as short work of his glass of whiskey and water (called 'grog' or 'nightcap') as he had made of the cross-word, and left the victors on the field of battle. Miss Kemp gave him time to get upstairs, in order to avoid the indelicacy of seeing a gentleman open his bedroom door, and perhaps disclose pyjamas warming by the fire, and then followed him in some haste, since her father (there was no indelicacy about that) always expected her to come and talk to him, when he had got to bed, about his evening symptoms, or read to him till he felt sleepy. She knew she was unusually late to-night, and it was possible that he had punished her by already putting out his light. This pathetic proceeding, he was sure, wrung her with agonies of remorse.
No such severity had been inflicted to-night; he was sitting up in bed with a book in front of him; and a fur tippet belonging to Florence round his neck for the protection of the glands of the throat. On the table beside him was the thermos flask filled with hot milk, in case he felt un-nourished during the night, the glass jug of lemonade made with saccharine instead of sugar in case he felt thirsty, and the clock with the luminous hands.
"I am late, Papa, I'm afraid," she said. "We had a most exciting rubber which would not come to an end."
His face wore its most martyred expression: he glanced at the clock which showed the unprecedented hour of eleven.
"Surely my clock is fast," he said.
"No; it is eleven," she said. "Shall I read to you?"
"Far too late: far, far too late. I shall be good for nothing in the morning as it is."
"You would like to go to sleep then?" she asked. "Shall I put out your light?"
"Indeed, I should very much like to go to sleep," he said, "but it is already long past my usual hour for going to sleep, and as you know, if I am not asleep by eleven, I often lie awake half the night. No doubt you were absorbed in your game, and could not spare a thought to me. Very natural. Two hours bridge! I was wrong to expect that perhaps it would occur to you--but no matter."
"Would you like me to talk to you then, if you don't feel you'll go to sleep?" she asked.
"Perhaps a little talk might compose me," said he, "if you can spare me ten minutes. I am very tired to-night, and that makes me wakeful. I have had a great deal to do. My thermos flask was unfilled, and I had to ring. There were no rusks in my little tin and I had to get out the big tin and fill it. My clock was not wound."
Florence sat down by his bed. Her chair grated on the margin of boards as she pulled it forward, and he winced.
"You've got everything now, haven't you?" she asked.
"Yes. I saw to everything myself. Talk to me, please. Yes?"
"I won three and ninepence," said Florence. "Colonel Chase lost to everybody."
"I heard him thumping by just now," said her father. "I supposed he had lost, for he banged his door. I was just beginning to get sleepy. A want of consideration, perhaps. Yes?"
At each interrogative 'yes', as Florence knew, a fresh topic of interest had to be furnished.
"Mrs. Oxney won threepence," she said.
"I am glad. Perhaps she will be able to afford me hot water in my bottle to-morrow. It was tepid tonight. I think you have told me enough about your game of bridge. Yes?"
"Miss Howard is playing at an entertainment in the assembly rooms next week."
"I will not go," said Mr. Kemp with some heat. "I do not see why I should be expected to turn out in the evening. Yes?"
Florence felt the swift on-coming of a sneeze. She fumbled in her bag for a handkerchief, and rattled richly among the nine coppers. Several violent explosions followed, and when the spasm subsided, she found her father spraying the air round him with his flask of disinfectant.
"Perhaps it would be wiser if you sat a little further off," he said. "Yes?"
"I don't think anything else has happened," said Florence wheezily. "Oh yes, that new arrival, Mrs. Bliss. I saw you talking to her. How she smiles! I wonder why?"
Mr. Kemp shewed the first sign of withdrawing the blight he had been casting on this commandeered conversation.
"She told me strange things," he said. "I could make little of them, though I must confess they interested me. She said I was perfectly well, and that pain had no real existence. To say that to me of all people appears on the face of it to be the gibbering of a lunatic. Yet as she talked I certainly did begin to feel that there was something behind it. She told me also that she was perfectly well, though I have never seen anybody limp more heavily. I scarcely think that I was as bad as that after my terrible experiences at Aix. I thought she would hardly be able to get upstairs yet she called to me from the landing, though much out of breath, that she had not felt a single twinge. Her theory is that all pain is an illusion or a delusion, I forget which, and if you only deny it, it vanishes. Ever since I came up to bed, which is a long time ago now, I have been denying it and I think--I am not sure, but I think--that I am lying a little more easily to-night than I have done since last Monday. But I must not get too much interested in it at this hour."
Mr. Kemp yawned as he spoke.
"I am beginning to get a little drowsy," he said. "I will not talk any more. Please go out very quietly, and turn off my light from the switch by the door. Don't bang it."
Florence tiptoed away to her room; though it was late, she felt wakeful and exhilarated. She had enjoyed her bridge, but it was not that alone, nor her unusually long remission from her father, nor yet the load of bullion that clinked in her bag which accounted for it. The evening had been adventurous, for Mrs. Holders had fluttered the red flag in the face of that formidable autocrat Colonel Chase: she had called in question the wisdom of his declaration, she had backed her own opinion by doubling, she had invoked the decision of Slam. And no retribution had followed, no thunderbolt had split her: the Colonel had merely paid up all round and gone to bed.
Florence wound up her watch and looked at her plump and rather pleasing image in the glass. Her hair was cropped like a man's, and parted at the side: she wore a stiff linen collar with a small black tie in a bow, and a starched shirt with a sort of Eton jacket; her skirt was about the same length as the jacket. Then crossing her legs in an easy attitude she sat down on her bed, and thought carefully over what had been happening this evening. It was an application of Mrs. Holders's defiance, rather than the defiance itself that claimed her attention. For Wentworth in general dumbly travailed under the domination of the Colonel, and if three hours ago she had been asked what she supposed would happen if anyone questioned his rulings and his bawlings and his tuition, her imagination would have failed to picture so impossible a contingency. Yet the impossible had now occurred and nothing had happened. The application was obvious, and she found herself wondering what would happen if she questioned her father's right to immolate her day and night on the altar of his aches. Daring though such a supposition was, would nothing particular happen?
Florence let the hypochondriac history of the last seven years, from the time when her father had seriously taken up the profession of invalidism instead of having no profession at all, spread itself panoramically out in front of her. Her mother was alive then, and for those first two years of this lean series, the three of them had trodden the uneasy circle
