“I shall be all right,” he said again. “I don’t think there is anything to be done. It isn’t serious. I’ll see a doctor in the morning if necessary.”
But Frances was too practical to be thus reassured. “You must let me help you,” she said. “You must.”
He yielded the point abruptly. “Very well—if you wish it. Get some hot water, Jarvis! I’ve had a bit of an accident.”
He moved forward to the stairs, and Frances went with him, feeling herself once more the victim of an inexorable Fate.
They went up together, Rotherby stumbling until she gave him her arm to steady him. Reaching a small landing on which a gas-jet burned low, he directed her into a room with an open door, and they entered, he leaning upon her.
The moonlight flooded in through the uncovered window, and she saw that it was a bedroom with an old four-poster bed. She helped Rotherby to it, and he sank down upon the foot with a sigh of relief.
“Have you got any matches?” she said.
“In my pocket—on the right,” he said. “Can you get them?”
She felt for and found them. As she stood up again he surprised her by catching her hand to his lips. She drew it quickly away, and he said nothing.
She lighted the gas, that flared starkly in the shabby, old-fashioned room, and turned round to him again, forcing herself to a calm and matter-of-fact attitude.