No one would have resented such a course of action more derisively than Lady Maria herself, but the last three days had reduced her to something like hysteria, and she had entirely lost her head.

“She has been writing cheerfully to me—­”

“She would have written cheerfully to you if she had been seated in a cauldron of boiling oil, it is my impression,” broke in her ladyship.  “She has been monstrously treated, people trying to murder her, and she afraid to accuse them for fear that you would disapprove.  You know you have a nasty manner, James, when you think your dignity is interfered with.”

Lord Walderhurst stood clenching and unclenching his hands as they hung by his sides.  He did not like to believe that his fever had touched his brain, but he doubted his senses hideously.

“My good Maria,” he said, “I do not understand a word you say, but I must go and see her.”

“And kill her, if she has a breath left!  You will not stir from here.  Thank Heaven! here is Dr. Warren.”

The door had opened and Dr. Warren came in.  He had just laid down upon the coverlet of a bed upstairs what seemed to be the hand of a dying woman, and no man like himself can do such a thing and enter a room without a singular look on his face.

People in a house of death inevitably whisper, whatsoever their remoteness from the sick-room.  Lady Maria cried out in a whisper: 

“Is she still alive?”

“Yes,” was the response.

Walderhurst went to him.

“May I see her?”

“No, Lord Walderhurst.  Not yet.”

“Does that mean that it is not yet the last moment?”

“If that moment had obviously arrived, you would be called.”

“What must I do?”

“There is absolutely nothing to be done but to wait.  Brent, Forsythe, and Blount are with her.”

“I am in the position of knowing nothing.  I must be told.  Have you time to tell me?”

They went to Walderhurst’s study, the room which had been Emily’s holy of holies.

“Lady Walderhurst was very fond of sitting here alone,” Dr. Warren remarked.

Walderhurst saw that she must have written letters at his desk.  Her own pen and writing-tablet lay on it.  She had probably had a fancy for writing her letters to himself in his own chair.  It would be like her to have done it.  It gave him a shock to see on a small table a thimble and a pair of scissors.

“I ought to have been told,” he said to Dr. Warren.

Dr. Warren sat down and explained why he had not been told.

As he spoke, interest was awakened in his mind by the fact that Lord Walderhurst drew towards him the feminine writing-tablet and opened and shut it mechanically.

“What I want to know,” he said, “is, if I shall be able to speak to her.  I should like to speak to her.”

“That is what one most wants,” was Dr. Warren’s non-committal answer, “at such a time.”