"Oh yes. Hilda knew."
"Well, I'm dashed!" The exclamation showed naïvete. His impression of the chicanery of women was deepened, so that it actually disquieted him. "But I suppose," he went on, "I suppose this row isn't going to stop Clara from coming here, seeing the state Auntie's in?"
"No, certainly not. Clara would come like a shot if she knew, and Albert as well. She's a good nurse--in some ways."
"Well, if they aren't told, and anything happens to Auntie in the night, there'll be a fine to-do afterwards,--don't forget that."
"Nothing'll happen to Auntie in the night," said Maggie, with tranquil reassurance. "And I don't think I could stand 'em to-night."
The hint of her nervous susceptibility, beneath that stolid exterior, appealed to him.
Maggie, since closing the account-book, had moved foot by foot anxiously towards the door, and had only been kept in the room by the imperative urgency of the conversation. She now had her hand on the door.
"I say!" He held her yet another moment. "What's this about me taking your room? I don't want to turn you out of your room."
"That's all right," she said, with a kind smile. "It's easiest, really. Moreover, I daresay there won't be such a lot of sleeping.... I must go up at once. She can't possibly be left alone."
Maggie opened the door and she had scarcely stepped forth when Minnie from the kitchen rushed into the lobby and dropped, intentionally or unintentionally, on her knees before her. Edwin, unobserved by Minnie, witnessed the scene through the doorway. Minnie, agitated almost to the point of hysteria, was crying violently and as she breathed her shoulders lifted and fell, and the sound of her sobbing rose periodically to a shriek and sank to a groan. She knelt with her body and thighs upright and her head erect, making no attempt to stem the tears or to hide her face. In her extreme desolation she was perhaps as unconscious of herself as she had ever been. Her cap was awry on her head, and her hair disarranged; the blinking spectacles made her ridiculous; only the blue print uniform, and the sinister yellowish apron drawn down tight under her knees, gave a certain respectable regularity to her extraordinary and grotesque appearance.