Pamela did all this without speaking a word; but when she got to the door of Lucy's room she stopped and looked back. She could see from the tremulous motion of the clothes that the girl was weeping, and she went over to the bed and put her cool lips to Lucy's forehead.
'Good-night, dear!' she said softly. 'I think you have behaved beautifully!'
WATTLES.
As soon as she could get away from Newnham the next morning, Lucy went to Addenbroke's to see Nurse Brannan. She couldn't get away very early; there was a mathematical lecture at nine o'clock that wasn't over till eleven, and she had to plod, plod through those weary diagrams while her mind was far away. Oh, how she hated those problems and riders, and all the dreary, dreary round! She made one or two futile little diagrams on her paper, and then she rubbed them out again, and sat staring at the blackboard, and watching the perplexing white lines come and go while her mind was far away. She was calculating what would happen if the man had died in the night.
'What would they do with the body? Would Eric Gwatkin expect her to keep the secret, and assist, perhaps, at some mysterious obsequies?' It was with a distinct feeling of relief she saw the duster sweep over the blackboard and wipe all those cabalistic characters away. It was like wiping out the record of her guilt.
Lucy shook off the dust and gloom of the lecture-room and ran off to Addenbroke's. She really could run a good part of the way. She went across the Fens, as less frequented, and giving her space to breathe and think. It was such a blue day, and the fresh green of the year was over the low-lying fields, and the chestnut-tree by the bridge was budding, and the pollard willows that marked the winding course of the river were sallow-gray in the sunshine, and the daisies were in bloom. Lucy walked over quite a carpet of flowers; she crushed the little tender pink buds remorselessly under her feet in her hurry to get to Addenbroke's.