Enid's white lips moved and tears trembled on her eyelashes; but she did not speak. Parker, seriously alarmed, hastened to procure smelling-salts, brandy, and eau-de-Cologne, and, with a few minutes' care, these applications produced the desired result. Enid looked a little less death-like; she smiled as she took a dose of brandy and sal-volatile, and moved her fingers towards the woman at her side. Parker did not at first know what she wanted, but discovered at last that the girl wanted to hold her hand. Contact with something human seemed to help to bring her back from the shadowy borderland where she had been wandering. Parker, astonished and confused, wanted to draw away her hand; but the small cold fingers closed over it resistlessly. Then the woman stood motionless, holding a vinaigrette in her free hand, and looking at the pale face on the pillow, at the pathetic blue eyes which sought her own from time to time as if in want of pity. Something made Parker's heart beat fast and the hot tears came into her hard, dark eyes. She had never felt any particular fondness for Miss Enid before; but somehow that mute appeal, that silent claiming of sympathy and help, made the woman who had spent the last few weeks in dogging her footsteps and spying out her secrets bitterly regret the bondage in which her past life had placed her.
"Do you feel better now, miss?" she asked, in an unusually soft tone, presently.
"Yes, thank you, Parker; but don't go just yet."
Parker stood immovable. Secretly she began to long to get away. She was afraid that she should cry if she stayed there much longer holding Enid's soft little white hand in hers.
"Parker," said Enid presently, "were you in your room last night soon after I went to bed?" The maid slept in the next room to that of her young mistress.
"Yes, miss—at least, I don't know what time it was."
"It was between nine and ten o'clock when I went to bed. Did you see anybody—any one all in white—come into my room after I was in bed? If your door was open, you might have seen any one pass."
"Good gracious, miss, one would think that you was speaking of a ghost! No, I didn't see anybody pass."
"I thought, perhaps," said Enid rather faintly, "that it might be Mrs. Vane coming to see how I was, you know. She has a loose white wrapper, and she often throws a white lace shawl over her head when she goes down the passages."
"You must have been dreaming, miss," said Parker. She found it easier to withdraw her hand now that the conversation had taken this turn.