Pittsey said afterwards: "He came in on me without knocking, and he looked as if he had just been wakened up and didn't quite know where he was." It struck Don at the time that Pittsey behaved as if he had been invited out to see a three-alarm fire; for, after his first staring amazement—half-risen from the dining-table, with a knife in his hand—he shouted and snatched at his overcoat and came laughing.
"Where's he? Conroy?" Don asked, in the carriage.
"He's running a quiet wedding of his own," Bert said; and because Don could not make sense of the reply, he did not ask any more questions.
He was worried by a sinking sensation in his stomach which had made it difficult for him to judge the length and reach of his legs, particularly in going up or coming down stairs. For that reason he left it to Pittsey to tell Mrs. McGahn that the cab was at the door; and when the voluble landlady appeared, behind her voice—like an actor who is heard shouting in the wings before he makes his entrance on the stage—Don sank back against the cushions, under cover of her garrulity, in a personal silence that was aware of Margaret at his side in every tingling nerve.
He lost her again when he came on the confusing necessity of remembering his name, his age, his colour and the number of times that he had been married before—filling out the document required by law. He signed it laboriously and gave up the pen to Pittsey, after trying to put it in his pencil pocket. He moved like a dummy to his place before a table in the minister's parlour, being divided against himself by the fact that the affair reminded him of his first rehearsal in
