Jack rang the bell, and sent for Kit's maid. The two brothers remained together in the hall without speaking till she came down again.
"Her ladyship will see Lord Evelyn now," she said.
Toby went up the staircase behind the woman. They came to Kit's door, and having tapped and been answered, he entered.
The blinds, as he had seen from the street, were down, and the room in low half-light. The dressing-table was close in front of the window, and in the dim rose light that filtered through the red stuff, he could at first see nothing but a faint sparkle of silver-backed brushes and bottles. Then to the right of the window the bed became outlined to his more accustomed gaze, and from it came Kit's voice, rather gentler and lower-pitched than its wont.
"Toby, it is dear of you to come to see me," she said. "But isn't it stupid of me? Directly after seeing Lily yesterday I came back here, and tripped on those steps leading from Jack's room. I came an awful bang. I must have been stunned, for I remember nothing till I found myself lying on the sofa here. Oh dear, I've got such a headache!"
Toby found himself suddenly encouraged. Of all moral qualities, he was disposed to put loyalty the first, and certainly Kit was being magnificently loyal. Her voice was perfectly her own; she did not say that she had stumbled over something of Jack's, still less that he, as Toby knew, had knocked her down. He drew a chair up to the bedside.
"It is bad luck, Kit," he said; "and really I am awfully sorry for you. Is your head very bad?"
"Oh, it aches!" said Kit; "but it was all my own fault. Now, if anyone else had been to blame for it, I should have been furious, and that would have made it ache worse." She laughed rather feebly. "So one is saved something," she went on, "and even with this head I am duly grateful. It is a day wasted, which is always a bore, but otherwise——"
And she stopped abruptly, for the glibness of her loyalty was suddenly cut short by a pang of pain almost intolerable, which pierced her like a sword. She bit the bedclothes in her determination not to cry aloud, and a twenty seconds' anguish left her weak and trembling.