His arm slipped round her and his lips pressed fiercely against her red mouth.
* * * * *
"Why can't you sleep?" asked the drowsy Christina, as the girl lit her candle for the second time.
"I don't know—I'm having such beastly dreams," said Evie fretfully.
BOOK THE SECOND
I
The step of Ambrose Sault was light and there was a buoyancy in his mien when he came into Mrs. Colebrook's kitchen, surprising that good lady with so unusual an appearance at an hour of the day when she was taking her afternoon siesta.
"Lord, how you startled me!" she said, "the ostymopat came this morning. A stout gentleman with whiskers. Very nice, too, and American. But bless you, Mr. Sault, he'll never do any good to Christina, though I wish he could, for I'm up and down those blessed stairs from the moment I get up to the moment I go to bed. He'll never cure her. She's had ten doctors and four specialists, and she's been three times to St. Mary's hospital; to say nothing of the Evelyna when she was a child and fell out of the perambulator that did it. Ten doctors and four specialists—they're doctors, too, in a manner of speaking, so you might say fourteen."
Sault never interrupted his landlady, although his forbearance meant, very often, a long period of waiting.