Then she began to cry. “To think it should have come to this! I that have always held my head high—I don’t know what your aunts will say! It’ll be an awful shock for them.”
Elsie hardly heard what her mother was saying. Waves of physical nausea kept on passing over her, and she was conscious of nothing but thankfulness when an elderly woman in uniform came to her with a cup of tea, and suggested that she should lie down and get some sleep.
Elsie followed her, scarcely replying to Mrs. Palmer’s voluble farewell and assurances of her own speedy return.
She could not afterwards have told where it was that she was taken, but a small, narrow bed awaited her, and she flung herself on to it and fell almost at once into the trance-like sleep of utter bodily and mental exhaustion.
The same uniformed woman was waiting for her when she woke, after several hours, and the sight of her brought back in a sick rush the horrors of the morning.
“Oh, I must go home!” cried Elsie.
The woman took very little notice of her words, but she conducted her to a lavatory and helped her to make her toilette.
Cold water and the effects of sleep combined slightly to steady the wretched Elsie. “I should like to go home at once, please,” she said, in a voice that she tried in vain to render firm.
“Yes. Well, I daresay your mother will take you away as soon as you’ve answered a few questions,” said the woman indifferently and quietly. “They want you downstairs first for a few minutes now.”
“Is Mother there?”