She stared at him, speechless. How could he wilfully distort facts in this barefaced way? It seemed a revelation of some incredible pettiness of character hitherto unsuspected in him. When she found her voice she spoke evenly, with perfect self-control.
"I think, doctor, you will have a hard job of it trying to pin this on me," she replied, and left him.
She knew that his eyes followed her, and that during the rest of the afternoon he glanced at her often, as if he did not know how to construe her momentary defiance, but she was indifferent to what he thought. She knew that at this late date he would not risk a change of nurses, and that was enough for her. Her only concern was for her patient.
Before evening everyone was aware that Sir Charles, whom they had believed to be out of danger, had suffered a severe relapse. Depression lay like a pall on the household. Lady Clifford fidgeted about from one room to another aimlessly. Roger smoked endless cigarettes.
"Do you think the doctor could have foreseen this?" Miss Clifford inquired of Esther about night-fall. "You remember how he warned us last night against being too hopeful."
"He couldn't possibly have guessed it! No one could. The whole thing has come out of the blue. I can't think how to account for it. If he had been given anything to eat, solid food, or—but no, that is simply out of the question."
The more Esther thought of it the more utterly she was mystified. The affair was inexplicable. She scorned to consider for a moment the doctor's absurd attempt to accuse her, having seen the old man weather a storm infinitely worse.
When, tired and dispirited, she went to her room that night, she fancied, on opening the door, that a faint odour of tobacco greeted her—the doctor's strong Algerian tobacco.
"That wretched man is getting on my nerves," she murmured under her breath. "I couldn't possibly smell cigarette smoke here, the door has been closed all day."
A moment later she stood still in front of the dressing-table, her eyes running over its contents. Was everything as she had left it? The maid never touched anything after she did the room in the morning, yet somehow the various boxes and bottles, trays, and so on, had an altered appearance. Her quick eye roamed around. On the table was her first-aid case, where she had put it down that morning. She opened it and looked inside. She could not absolutely swear things were different and yet… She turned and surveyed the whole room, then one by one pulled open the drawers in the commode. Here and there she felt sure some object had been touched and disarranged. If she had not been an orderly person she might not have noticed. Last she opened her shopping bag. She found the metal cover of her lip-stick off, and a streak of red on the lining of the bag. Then she felt certain: there was nothing missing, yet she was convinced that someone had been ransacking her belongings pretty thoroughly. One of the maids, perhaps, out of idle curiosity. It didn't interest her much.