A faint colour rose to her cheek. “Oh!” she said, clutching nervously at the sheet with her emaciated fingers, “do you think I shall die?”
It was the hopeful eagerness with which patients generally asked him, “Do you think I shall get well?” Hugh began to see light.
“You speak almost as if you did not wish to live,” he said gravely. “Surely that cannot be. You are young, and neither I nor Dr. Hildyard think that there is any real reason why you should not be restored to your old active life, and to your friends.”
Her eyelids drooped. “I have—no—friends,” she said, with effort. “I left my elder sister and brother, and went on the stage. They have not forgiven me. I have no parents. They are dead.”
“But——” Hugh hesitated a moment. “You know I have heard all about you,” he said. “You were making success after success in various provincial towns—you must have already had scores of admiring friends among the public when that unfortunate accident occurred.”
“Accident!” she said, scornfully. “That was no accident.”
“It could not possibly have been anything else,” said, Hugh, warmly. “No human being could have been so brutal——”
“No one—was—brutal,” she said; her breathing rapid with the fatigue and excitement of speaking. “I—did it—myself. I—flung myself down—and pulled the scene—with me. It came to me—suddenly. I felt I could not live—any—longer.”
Her great shining eyes were dry—but their agonising wistfulness was more piteous than tears. Hers was evidently some incurable grief. Hugh felt disinclined to probe further. Still, he spoke gently and comfortingly to the poor child—the friendless, motherless girl. He said, truly, that he felt no doubt but that her rash act was the consequence of overstrain. Were she to die now, or later on, she would not, in his opinion, be guilty of the frightful crime of self-murder. Then he asked her, seeing that her troubled expression remained, whether she would like to see a clergyman.
“Then you do believe I shall die?” she said, a sudden light crossing her face like a sunbeam. “Oh, thank God!”