" He went out into the passage, still chafing
under a sense of mental disturbance which was new to him, and shouted
to his wife more fiercely than ever--"Pack up what we want for a week's
absence, and be ready in half an hour!" Having issued those directions,
he returned to the breakfast-room, and looked at the half-spread table
with an impatient wonder at his disinclination to do justice to his own
meal. "She has rubbed off the edge of my appetite," he said to himself,
with a forced laugh. "I'll try a cigar, and a turn in the fresh air."
If he had been twenty years younger, those remedies might have failed
him. But where is the man to be found whose internal policy succumbs
to revolution when that man is on the wrong side of fifty? Exercise and
change of place gave the captain back into the possession of himself.
He recovered the lost sense of the flavor of his cigar, and recalled
his wandering attention to the question of his approaching absence
from Aldborough. A few minutes' consideration satisfied his mind that
Magdalen's outbreak had forced him to take the course of all others
which, on a fair review of existing emergencies, it was now most
desirable to adopt.
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