She spoke to unheeding ears, for Lucy had fallen with a little cry to the floor.
She tried in vain to rouse her. Her face was perfectly colourless, and her lips were white, and she lay like a log where she had fallen.
Maria undid her dress and loosened the things about her throat, and threw some water over her face and hands, and then, finding she didn't revive at all, she got frightened and ran to get assistance. Pamela Gwatkin was the only girl who was in her room at that hour, and Maria implored her to come at once.
Pamela was sitting with her hands clasped before her and an open letter in her lap. She looked up when Maria came in with a bewildered look in her eyes, which were heavy with weeping.
'You must not ask me,' she said harshly; 'I would not put my hand out to save her. You must ask someone else. I can never, never forgive her!'
If Pamela could not find it in her heart to forgive the girl who had ruined Wyatt Edgell's life, it was harder for Lucy to forgive herself.
As she lay tossing with fever in her little darkened room for weeks after that miserable day, she reproached herself a thousand times for having murdered her lover. The shock of Wyatt Edgell's death had told on her already overwrought nervous system, and it had given way, and she had been struck down with brain-fever.
It was not an unusual thing in a women's college.
No one but Pamela Gwatkin and Maria knew the real cause; everyone else, doctors and all, put it down to overwork—to the mathematics she was getting up for the Little-go.