One wild look round, then an almost savage instinct of self-preservation leaped up within her, forcing her into self-possession.
"Certainly," she said, crossing to the door and opening it.
"Are you better, dear? You don't look up to much," said Sir Thomas, gazing critically at her. "Vansittart has just been here, and left this for you. I had asked him to come in and have dinner with us. But hearing you were ill, he would not stay."
CHAPTER XIX
Sir Thomas Thorne was sincerely, honestly attached to his beautiful young orphan niece--perhaps the sentiment was all the stronger for being tinged with a latent remorse for his callous attitude towards her dead parents in the still unforgotten past.
It was almost a shock to him to see Joan look so "awfully bad," as he termed it to himself. As he placed his paper package, a round, light one, on the nearest table in her bright, pretty bed-chamber, and seated himself by her, he wondered, a little anxiously, whether she was not perhaps ill with the insidious family disease which had "made short work" of his younger brother, her father. Ill-health would account for most of what he considered her "vagaries."
"I think you ought to see the doctor, Joan--really I do!" he exclaimed, with concern, as he gazed at her. She was white as her cream cashmere dressing-gown, and there were deep bistre circles round her more than usually brilliant eyes. "Let me send for him----"
"Oh, I am all right!" exclaimed Joan, easily. She wondered at this new, unwonted self-possession. It seemed to her as if she--she--Victor's slayer--were standing aside--apart--and watching the doings of the better self from which her past actions had for ever divorced her. "What have you brought me?"
"Flowers, Vansittart said," replied her uncle, brightly. "I met him at the club, and he seemed as if he were to have a lonely evening--it was just one of those blank nights when one happens to have a lull in one's engagements--so I asked him to come in to dinner. He came, and brought this; but went away, as I said, when he heard you were out of sorts, saying he would call round and inquire in the morning."
He tore away the paper covering and disclosed a basket of blue and white flowers--a chef-d'oeuvre of a West-End florists. "Pretty, aren't they?" he said, handing them to Joan, his head admiringly on one side.