She laid hers within it, and his first thought was to take her into his consulting-room, but he led her upstairs towards the drawing-room, and she walked firmly enough till they were nearly at the landing, when he felt her swerve, and but for his quick action she would have fallen back.
“My poor darling!” he whispered, as he lifted her in his arms. “You have done most bravely. It has been too much for any woman to go through.”
It was but a few steps, and then he paused upon the landing while he threw open the drawing-room door and bore her in, quite insensible now to all that passed.
For as he entered the room Chester found himself face to face with his sister; but she was not, as he had anticipated, alone. Isabel was with her, and they stood gazing at him as if stunned by the sudden intrusion.
Chapter Thirty Two.
Something in the Sawdust.
Highcombe Street gradually became blocked by the eager crowd always ready to gather, discuss and microscopically magnify the event that has been the attraction, and in a very short time it was current that a dreadful deed had been perpetrated in open daylight at the window of the ground floor room on the left of the front door. The victim was said to have been seen shrieking wildly for help, till a man had dragged her away, closing the window afterward and shutting the shutters, so that, with the blinds of the upstairs windows drawn down, the whole of the mansion had a strangely-mysterious aspect which, to the over-heated brains of many of the lookers-on, exactly suggested the place where, a murder might have been committed.
It did not occur to the wonder-gulpers that there were several houses in the same street presenting precisely the same aspect consequent upon their owners being out of town, and that the mansion next door, with its gloomy, unkempt aspect and soot-coated windows, was much more forbidding; but then it had no policeman stationed at the area gate and two more at the front door, who objected vigorously to boys climbing over the railings and others trying to peer through the long, slit-like windows on either side of the entrance.