"Mrs. Wollaston won't be able to see you to-day," she said. He sprang to his feet and she added instantly, "I'm her stepdaughter, Mary Wollaston. Won't you come in?" Without waiting for an answer, she turned and led the way into the drawing-room.
So far it had been rehearsed, on her way down-stairs, even to the chair in the bow window which she indicated, having seated herself, for him to sit down in. She had up to that point an extraordinarily buoyant sense of self-possession. This left her for one panicky instant when she felt him looking at her a little incredulously as if, once more, he wondered whether she were really there.
"I think, perhaps, you haven't heard of father's illness," she began—not just as she had expected to. "Or did you come to ask about him?"
"No," he said. "I hadn't heard. Is it—yes, of course it must be—serious. I'm sorry."
She was struck by the instantaneous change in his manner. From being, part of him, anyhow, a little remote—wool-gathering would have been Aunt Lucile's term—he was, vividly, here. It wasn't possible to doubt the reality of his concern. As a consequence, when she began informing him of the state of things she found herself pulled away, more and more, from the impersonal phraseology of a medical bulletin. She told how the attack had come on; how they had put up a bed for him in the music room, where there was the most air, and begun what it was evident from the first would be a life-and-death struggle; she quoted what Rush had told her when he met the train. "I agree with Rush," she concluded. "They let me see him, for a few minutes, this morning, just so he'd know that I had come back. Yet it isn't possible not to believe that he will get well."
When she had squeezed away the tears that had dimmed her eyes, she saw that his own were bright with them. "He's more than just a great man," he said gravely. Then, after a moment's silence, "If there's anything I can do… It would be a great privilege to be of service to him. As errand boy, any sort of helper. I had some hospital experience at Bordeaux."
It was, on the face of it, just such an offer as any kindly disposed inquirer would have made. Such as Wallace Hood, for example, had, in fact, made, only rather more eloquently less than an hour ago. But Mary's impulse was not to answer as she had answered Wallace with a mere polite acknowledgment of helpless good intentions. In fact, she could find, for the moment, no words in which to answer him at all.
He said then, "I mustn't keep you."
Even in response to that she made no movement of release. "There's nothing, even for me to do," she said, and felt from the look this drew from him that he must, incredibly, have caught from her some inkling of what her admission really meant.
He did not repeat his move to go, nor speak, and there was silence between them for, perhaps, the better part of a minute. It was terminated, startlingly, for her, by her brother's appearance in the doorway. He had on his raincoat and carried his hat and an umbrella in his hands.