Adelaide strode into the room at this juncture with the air of a tragedy queen.
“Thank Heaven, you are safe, Milly dear!” she said, pausing beside the bed, but her look was not one of pious thanksgiving. Her voice had a sharp sound, and a crimson spot flamed on her dark cheeks. “He dared to hold my hands in his,” she murmured, “and, worse still, to call me ‘noble girl,’ and his ‘poor child’; and he will think that I went down those stairs on purpose to see his face in my mirror. Oh, how I hate him, how I hate him!”
CHAPTER VII.
A STATE OF “DREADFULNESS.”
Miss Noakes had not heard us, but our troubles were not over.
It was not until I had helped Adelaide to retire (for her poor hands were too badly burned to put up her own hair), and had gone away into my own room that I realized that Winnie was not with us and that she had been left behind in the stampede up the turret stairs. I crept around through the corridor into the darkened studio. Professor Waite and his friend had gone, why had not Winnie returned? I opened the door leading to the turret and called her name softly. I was answered by a groan. I hastened to light a candle and stole down the winding stair. Half way down I found Winnie sitting on the steps, a bundle of misery.
“I came up once,” she exclaimed, “but Professor Waite was in the studio and I had to go back to the closet and wait until he left the house.”
“It must have been very chilly and unpleasant with nothing but a watering can and a lawn mower to sit on,” I remarked; “but why didn’t you come all the way up this time. You surely don’t intend to spend the night where you are.”
“I don’t know,” Winnie replied, with another groan; “I’ve sprained my ankle or something, and I can’t bear my weight on it. It was all that I could do to drag myself up and back again, and then as far as this. Ow! how it hurts! No, I just cannot take another step.”