“How do you feel?” asked Merivale, as I opened my eyes.
“I feel as though I should like to annihilate myself,” I answered, as memory cleared up. “I have permanently disgraced us both.”
“But what was the trouble? You were doing nobly, splendidly, when all of a sudden you collapsed like that,” clapping his hands. “The doctor is furious, says it was all my fault.” “No, it wasn’t your fault,” I hastened to put in. “I should have pulled through after a fashion, only unluckily I caught sight of Tikulski—her uncle, you know—in the orchestra; and, well, I—I suppose—well, you see it was so unexpected that it rather undid me.”
“Oh, yes; I understand,” said he.
We kept silence all the way home in the carriage.
Next morning, as I entered the sitting-room, Merivale tried to hide a newspaper under his coat.
“Oh, don’t bother to do that,” I said. “Of course it is all in print?”
Possessing myself of the newspaper, I had the satisfaction of reading a sensational account of my fiasco. But what I had most dreaded from the quarter of the newspapers had not come to pass. None of them identified me as the Ernest Neuman who, rather more than two years since, had been tried for murder.