Impossible to imagine this. He remembered that freckled, rather dowdy, mechanically-smiling girl who was always the background for Lord Canifest; who was quietly efficient, who expertly managed his correspondence and was not permitted a second cocktail.
"Berserk?" repeated Katharine Bohun, although it hurt her to speak. She tried to laugh, weakly. "Louise? She can't help it; she's hysterical. After what happened last night oh, please don't be a fool! I don't feel especially well myself. "
"I know you don't," said the other grimly, and bent forward as she tried to support herself against the wall. "What on earth are you doing now? Let me down! Let me down, do you hear?"
He carried a rather dazed and somewhat frightened young lady, who asked him if he had gone mad, straight to his own room, and pushed open the door with his foot. Then, because it was comfortable and also because he wanted a look at her in better light, he put her down on the cushions of the window-seat in its deep embrasure. Without looking at her he rummaged in a suitcase after the bottle of brandy he found it advisable to carry in England as preparedness against the inexorable earliness of closing-hour. When he returned she was leaning back against the comer of the window with an expression in which weariness blurred out even anger or relief.
"No," she said, rather quickly. "I'm all right. No brandy, thanks."
"Drink it! — Why not?"
It was, he thought, probably utter exhaustion that made her tell the truth then; she spoke involuntarily, and in spite herself.
"Because Uncle Maurice would say I had been drinking." "Good old Uncle Maurice! Here..: ' She swallowed with difficulty and a good deal of pain, while he soaked a towel in water, wrung it out, and tried to adjust it round the purplish bruises on her neck. "That's better. That's fine. Like it?"
"Of course I like it."
"Have another? No? Then wait till I get this thing fixed around your neck, and then I wish you'd tell me what makes friends of yours like — like the Honorable Louise Carewe," the name sounded fantastic in his ears as he said it, when applied to that self-effacing girl whom he always pictured as sitting on a chair lower than that of anybody else. He tested it again. "Friends of yours like the Honorable Louise Carewe go hysterical and try to kill you. Sit still!"