She leaped out of her car. Amid the wreckage of the motorcycle the clock stared up at her like a little white face. The world seemed to have become silent; her feet beating on the cement as she ran made the only sound. The man lay motionless. He was bent together and strangely twisted like a boneless scarecrow thrown down by the winds. An arm was under him, his eyes were closed, blood was oozing from his mouth. She stooped over him, trying to lift his body into a more natural position; but he was a large man, and she could do nothing with him. She looked up from the struggle and found to her astonishment that she was no longer alone. People seemed to have sprung from the earth, the air was full of screams and explanations. A large touring car had come to a standstill near by. She vaguely remembered having passed it. A flivver was panting across the road. Everyone was asking questions, which she did not stop to answer. The important thing was to get the man into the touring car and take him to the hospital.
She was so absorbed in all his that her own connection with the situation did not enter her mind. As she sat in the back of the car supporting his body, the blood stiffening on her own dark clothes, she thought only of her victim. She was not the type of egotist who thinks always, "How terrible that this should have happened to me!"
She said to herself: "He probably has a wife and children. It would have been better if I had been the one to be killed."
Arrived at the hospital, she followed him into the ward where the stretcher carried him, and waited outside the screen while the nurses cut his clothes off. It seemed to her hours before the young house surgeon emerged, shaking his head.
"Fracture of the base," he said. "If he gets through the next twenty-four hours he'll have a 60 per cent chance," and he hurried away to telephone the details to his chief.
As she sat there she realized that her own body was sore and stiff. She must have wrenched herself, or struck the steering wheel in the sudden turn of the car. She felt suddenly exhausted. There seemed no point in waiting. They could telephone her the result of the night. She left her name and address and went home by train.
She made a vow to herself that she would never drive a car again. She would not explain it or discuss it, but nothing should ever induce her to touch a steering wheel. It was an inadequate expiation. Every time she shut her eyes she saw that heap of blood and steel at the foot of the telegraph pole. Oh, if time could only be turned back so that she could be starting a second time from Eleanor's door! It never crossed her mind that this terrible personal misfortune which had befallen her made her seriously amenable to the law.
CHAPTER VIII
Drummond died late in the evening. An account of the accident was in the headlines of the morning papers. Unfortunately for Lydia, he was a conspicuous local figure. He had had the early popularity of a good-looking, dissipated boy, and then he had been one of the men who had not waited for the draft but had volunteered and gone into the Regular Army, and had come home from France unwounded, with a heroic record. Moreover, there had been a long boy-and-girl love affair between him and Alma Wooley, the daughter of the hardware merchant. Mr. Wooley, who was a native Long Islander, hard and wise, had been opposed to the engagement until, after the war, the return of Drummond as a hero made opposition impossible. It was at this point that O'Bannon had come to the rescue, securing the position of traffic policeman for the young man. The marriage was to have taken place in June.