“You know, ma’am, the doctors have said——­”

“Will you hold your tongue?  And give me what I require?  You are as bad as Mr. Verner.”

Catherine reached a tumbler, poured it half full, and handed it.  Mrs. Verner did not take it.

“Fill it,” she said.

So old Catherine, much against her will, had to fill it, and Sibylla drained the glass to the very bottom.  In truth, she was continually thirsty; she seemed to have a perpetual inward fever upon her.  Her shoulders were shivering as she set down the glass.

“Go and find my opera cloak, Catherine.  It must have dropped on the stairs, I know I put it on as I left my room.”

Catherine quitted the kitchen on the errand.  She would have liked to close the door after her; but it happened to be pushed quite back with a chair against it; and the pointedly shutting it might have been noticed by Sibylla.  She found the opera cloak lying on the landing, near Sibylla’s bedroom door.  Catching it up, she slipped off her shoes at the same moment, stole down noiselessly, and went into the presence of Miss Tempest.

Lucy looked astonished.  She sat at the table reading, waiting with all patience the entrance of Sibylla, ere she made tea.  To see Catherine steal in covertly with her finger to her lips, excited her wonder.

“Miss Lucy, she’s going to the ball,” was the old servant’s salutation, as she approached close to Lucy, and spoke in the faintest whisper.  “She is shivering over the kitchen fire, with hardly a bit of gown to her back, so far as warmth goes.  Here’s her opera cloak:  she dropped it coming down.  Cook’s gone out for a fly.”

Lucy felt startled.  “Do you mean Mrs. Verner?”

“Why, of course I do,” answered Catherine.  “She has been upstairs all this while, and has dressed herself alone.  She must not go, Miss Lucy.  She’s looking like a ghost.  What will Mr. Verner say to us if we let her!  It may just be her death.”

Lucy clasped her hands in her consternation.  “Catherine, what can we do?  We have no influence over her.  She would not listen to us for a moment.  If we could but find Mr. Verner!”

“He was going round to Mr. Jan’s when my lady drove off.  I heard him say it.  Miss Lucy, I can’t go after him; she’d find me out; I can’t leave her, or leave the house.  But he ought to be got here.”

Did the woman’s words point to the suggestion that Lucy should go?  Lucy may have thought it; or, perhaps, she entered on the suggestion of her own accord.

“I will go, Catherine,” she whispered.  “I don’t mind it.  It is nearly as light as day outside, and I shall soon be at Mr. Jan’s.  You go back to Mrs. Verner.”

Feeling that there was not a moment to be lost; feeling that Mrs. Verner ought to be stopped at all hazards for her own sake, Lucy caught up a shawl and a green sun-bonnet of Lady Verner’s that happened to be in the hall, and, thus hastily attired, went out.  Speeding swiftly along the moonlit road, she soon gained Deerham, and turned to the house of Dr. West.  A light in the surgery guided her at once to that room.