The young man looked at him coldly. "Not yet."
"Will he live?"
There was a longer pause before the other replied: "It's too soon to tell yet. It's up to you to hope so, I imagine."
He whispered again with the officer, then crossed the hall to the library, which he entered, closing the door behind him.
When the secretary reappeared he went quickly up the stair and along a hall. There he tapped on a door and opened it.
The room disclosed was the one in which Craig lay. At one side was a small table covered with a white cloth, with a mêlée of nickelled instruments, rolls of absorbent bandaging and a basin of reddened liquid. The air was full of the sickish-sweet halitus of some drug. Craig's head on the pillow was wound with the white swathing and the nurse stood beside the bed. The doctor came forward, and the secretary spoke to him in an undertone.
All at once Craig opened his eyes. He looked acutely at the faces so near him, the cloth-covered table with its instruments, the white-capped nurse.
"I—know," he said. He tried to lift a hand to his bandaged head. "How—bad?"
The doctor laid a professional hand on the one that strayed across the coverlet. "We want to pull you through, Mr. Craig," he said with soothing assurance, "and you must help us by wiping every anxiety from your mind. Only a dozen words with your secretary here, to help you stop even thinking, and then you are going to sleep."
The young man came to the bed-side. "It was an attempted burglary, as you probably realised, sir. Two men were hidden in the library and you were shot when they tried to get away. One of them has been caught. The servants say a lady was with you at the time and the police want to know who she was."