“Because it would have been a moral and physical impossibility for you to do what Miss Hamblyn did. She of course has now got to pay the price of her doings in nervous breakdown and physical suffering, but you would doubtless have had exactly the same amount of prostration to endure without having been able to accomplish anything.”
“You are not exactly complimentary to me,” said Gertrude, in an icy tone, although privately she was perfectly aware of the truth of the statement.
“I did not mean to be uncomplimentary,” he said gravely. “I am quite positive that wherever you were placed, or in whatever circumstances you found yourself, you would do your very best, and it would not be your fault if you failed in any way.”
Poor Gertrude! Never in all her life had she been made to feel so small, so utterly insignificant; and the worst of it was that the doctor was so perfectly innocent of any attempt to hurt her feelings. Indeed, in his secret heart he was very much drawn to her, and had been ever since their first meeting, and if there had been a prospect of his being able to keep a wife in decent comfort he would have asked her to marry him, so that he and Sonny might have a real home again.
But Gertrude, not being endued with second sight or any specially keen intuitive faculty, had no means of knowing how nearly she realized her companion’s ideal, and, believing that he rather despised her, was miserable accordingly.
She did not even notice that he held her hand closer than usual at the parting, but went indoors with a dragging pain at her heart, which was destined to keep her company for many a long day to come.
Mrs. Nichols was waiting for her, and they had a cup of tea together, talking in whispers for fear of disturbing Nell, who lay in the next room trying to go to sleep.
The door was just ajar, and to her strained sensibilities the whispers were perfectly audible, causing her indeed no small amount of mental torture.
They were saying the kindliest things about her, magnifying her into a heroine, while she, lying there with her broken wrist, hurt jaw, and torn ear, where Doss Umpey’s stick had hit her such cruel blows, knew herself to be a coward, and in a certain sense a traitor to her duty, because she had not said who it was that had planned to rob the big shed.
When Doss Umpey had encountered her, as he came stealing through the quiet moonlight, he had said that this was Brunsen’s job, and he was bound to help it through, although he did not hold with law-breaking himself, because of the danger of it.