‘Bicycle. It’s outside.’
He turned to his servant.
‘Tell them to put the pony in at once,’ he said, ‘and bring it round. And’—he looked at me sharply a moment—‘bring some brandy.’
I suppose I made some gesture of impatience, for he laid his hand on my arm with a quieting force.
‘Now, be sensible,’ he said; ‘I am going to get what I may require, and shall go off on your bicycle. You will follow in the cart, and, until it is ready, you will sit down here and drink a wine-glassful of brandy—neat, mind: I order it.’
He nodded at me, pointing to a chair, and I stumbled towards it, conscious for the first time of an overpowering exhaustion. My blood beat through my temples very thin and far away, but with frightful rapidity, and something sang in my ears like the whistle of a distant train. Then I became conscious that the butler had put a glass of brandy into my hand, and I drank it.
‘The cart will be round in ten minutes, sir,’ he said.
‘But Dr. Carlton?’ I asked.
‘Rode off a couple of minutes ago, sir. I should sit still, sir, if I were you.’
It can hardly have been an hour from the time the telegram first came to when the cart with me inside it drew up at Margery’s house. Against the porch leaned my bicycle, the lamp still burning, and lights, I saw, were burning in her bedroom directly over the door. Standing on a chair inside the hall was Dr. Carlton’s hat and a small black bag; on the floor close by was the pink sheet of the telegram, which I must have dropped when I ran upstairs. Even then I remember clinging in some desperate, dazed fashion to the hope that it was all a dream, and that the telegram would prove to be some trivial absurdity, and I picked it up and read it again.