‘Yes,’ said Mary with a sob; ‘the poor lamb took much worse just after he had gone; she got so excited, and talked so fast, we could hear her all over the house. She would have it that she was playing in the garden with you, Master Vivian, and with little Master Claude, and Master Claude heard her, and began to cry, and that made her worse, so Anne put on his coat and has taken him over to Mrs Anstey’s. He will be quite happy there playing with the other children, and I am to go and sleep with him at night.’
‘And has Dr Robson been here all this time?’ asked the boys, awed and startled by the thought that Isobel could be ill enough to need such attention, and yet feeling somehow that it was all a bad dream, and that they would suddenly wake up and find her merry, mischievous face at their elbows.
‘Yes, he has,’ said Mary with a sigh; ‘and they have sent for an hospital nurse and a big doctor from London, Sir Somebody Something—I forget his name. And they have telegraphed for your father, Master Ronald; I heard master order the carriage to go and meet him at Victoria; they expect him by the four o’clock train.’
Vivian waited to hear no more. Regardless of Mary’s warning, ‘You were to stay here in the schoolroom, Master Vivian,’ he rushed away as noiselessly as he could to his own room, feeling that he must be alone, and that he must have time to think. He was not crying—tears seemed far away; but he felt as if some terrible darkness were settling round him, a darkness with no light in it. He was a thief, Joe had been taken up, and now Isobel was dying. In after years Vivian looked back on that moment as the blackest and most desperate of his whole life.
‘You’d better go after him, Master Ronald, and see where he has gone to,’ whispered Mary, ‘and I will stay here with Master Ralph. Only keep him quietly in his room, or else bring him back here, for you mustn’t be waiting about the corridor. Master said you weren’t to do that on any account. They have Miss Isobel’s door and window open, and she hears the slightest sound, though she doesn’t know anybody.’
‘Mary, will she die?’
The question forced itself from Ronald’s quivering lips in spite of himself, and in spite of a protesting groan from Ralph, who had flung himself face downwards on the hearthrug. He had never realised before how dear the unselfish little sister was to him; and now his conscience was speaking very plainly, and telling him that it was she who had always done things for him, and that he had taken very little trouble to try and give her pleasure.
‘Girls are made to fag for their brothers’ had been the cry of the boys at school, and he had thought it a fine thing to believe it, and to act upon it; but somehow everything looked different to-day.
‘She is in God’s hands, Master Ronald,’ answered Mary unsteadily, ‘and everything will be done for her that they can do, but’—— She did not finish the sentence, and her kind eyes filled with tears.
The same question which he had just asked Mary awaited Ronald when he reached his room, where Vivian sat huddled up on the deep window-seat, looking out at the bright sunshine with dull, unseeing eyes.