"Miss Carstairs is very ill," repeated Varney, not inquiringly, but like a child saying over a lesson.
"Awfully ill," said Peter encouragingly. "It seems that she came home Thursday night a little after seven, looking very pale and badly, but insisting that there was nothing the matter. She sat upstairs with her mother until about eight, when somebody called her down to the telephone. Well, she didn't come back. So after a while Mrs. Carstairs sent down to find out why. The maid found her in the hall—in fact, on the floor, I believe. She had fainted, you know. Yes—that was it. Fainted dead away—poor little girl."
After what seemed an eternity of waiting, Varney asked: "What was it—do you know? At the telephone?"
"Yes. It was Mrs. Marne. She called up Miss Carstairs in the first excitement of—of your accident, it seems, and I'm afraid she gave a very exaggerated and alarming account, you know. They put her to bed," continued Peter clearing his throat, "and there she's been ever since. The great shock, you know. Mrs. Marne saw her this morning—the first time she had been admitted. It's all quite sad. Quite sad. We'll talk of it again when—you're feeling a bit stronger."
Varney, who had lain like a statue for two days and nights, had begun moving a little under the coverlet, stirring first one swathed leg, then the other, as though seeking vainly to shift his position. Now he said at once: "I want to hear now."
Peter gave a deep sigh. He thought, and rightly, that this was the best thing that had happened yet.
"Well, it's all very strange, Larry. When I said that it was the shock of the accident that had made her ill, I did not tell the whole truth. It seems that she is suffering from a terrible hallucination about it. She feels in some strange way that the responsibility for all this—is hers. She told Mrs. Marne that she was responsible for your being on the road that night, and that she had been unfair about something or other, and that but for that the—trouble would never have happened. I don't pretend to understand it. But feeling as she does now—if anything were to—to go wrong, the poor child would count herself—she would count herself—"
"Don't!" said Varney very clearly and distinctly.
His face looked all at once so ghastly that Peter's heart stopped beating. He thought in a horrible flash that the end had come, and that he, Peter Maginnis, had brought it by tearing at the worst wound his friend had. His clumsy diplomacy fell from him as at the last trump. He dropped on his knees beside the bed with a groan.
"For God's sake, Larry, don't leave that mark to a child like her.
Don't give us all that sorrow to carry to our graves—"