Max was rejoicing in this, but Carrie looked anxious.
"It isn't natural, healthy sleep, I'm afraid," said she, in a low voice. "It's more like stupor. It wasn't the water that did it, it was a blow on the head. You saw the mark. I'm afraid it's concussion of the brain."
"Ought he to travel, then?" asked Max, anxiously.
Carrie, who was sitting beside Dudley, and opposite to Max, hesitated a little before answering:
"What else could we do? We couldn't leave him there at the wharf, could we? And where else could we have taken him? Not back to his chambers, certainly!"
There was silence. The carriage jogged on in the darkness through London's ugly outskirts, and the two watchers listened solicitously to the heavy breathing of their patient. It was a comfort to Max, a great one indeed, to have Carrie for a companion on this doleful journey. But she was not the same girl, now that she had duties to attend to, that she had been over that tête-à-tête dinner, or even during the journey in the hansom. He himself felt that he now counted for nothing with her, that he was merely the individual who happened to occupy the opposite seat; that her interest, her attentions, were absorbed by the unconscious man by her side.
"Why didn't you become a hospital nurse?" asked Max, suddenly.
He heard rather than saw that she started.
"That's just what I thought of doing," she answered, after a little pause. "I'm just old enough to enter one of the Children's Hospitals as a probationer. They take them at twenty."
"I see. Then you couldn't have tried before."