They had the two front seats of the bus: he lowered his eyes from the road in front of him and looked across at het with an earnest smile. "You know Edie, I think we were letting ourselves run to seed. Fancy forgetting the country was half an hour away!" Edith dared not rejoice too soon. Too often, in the past hopeless year she had known brief moments when he had pulled himself together and been as eager and as happy as this. And yet his present mood was more genuine than anything she had seen since the first day of his retirement: it was building up, and she scarcely dared say a word that might destroy it. He was sitting well forward on his seat, tapping the floor impatiently with his walking stick – deploring the appearance of new ones, but fretting all the time to be off, and walking. He seemed to have forgotten all about his lumbago. t
