“My dear, what is it? Can I help you in any way?”
And then, no doubt to the infinite relief of the Harrisons, the unknown replied. She had a little husky voice when she first spoke, a voice that suggested the last sleepy clutter of roosting birds; and her speech came with an appearance of effort.
“Presently,” she said rather indistinctly, and added something that sounded like “more strength.”
Lady Ulrica was painfully short-sighted. She had those large, protuberant brown eyes, almost devoid of expression, that are sometimes indicative of heart trouble. And as she answered, she was fumbling at her breast for the impressive, handled lorgnette that was discovered later on the coffee table under the cedar.
“We weren’t quite sure, you know,” she said in her authoritative contralto; “whether you were an apparition or not, and so we came to see. But, of course, now we have seen you and heard you speak, we shall be delighted to help you if you want help, or—if you’d prefer it—to go away.”
“Stay near me,” the stranger said in a clearer voice, and striking a lower pitch than when she had spoken first. “Till I get more strength.”
The rest of the party had paused in a little knot, some six or seven feet away, while this brief conversation had gone forward, listening staring with an absorption that in other circumstances might have been judged as slightly lacking in good taste. But now, some kind of realisation of their attitude seemed to come to them, and they diverted their attention by a manifest effort from the two people on the edge of the plantation and began to talk in low voices among themselves.
Mrs. Harrison, moving across to her husband, looked at him with raised eyebrows, silently asking the obvious question.
“Fraud,” he said in a careful undertone, and added rather more viciously, “Hoax of some kind.”
Mrs. Harrison, however, was not to be rebuffed so easily. “But, Charles,” she said with a slight urgency, as if she would persuade him to be reasonable; “don’t you think there is something very odd about her? As if she were not quite sane? That pose of the Virgin Mary when she was in the moonlight as we came up? And did you notice that she’s wearing quite the commonest sort of tulle scarf?”