"I reckoned upon your staying to lunch," said Lefevre.
"I can't!—I can't!... Very sorry, my dear Lefevre, but I really can't! Forgive what seems my rudeness. It distresses me that at such a time as this my sensations are so acute. But I cannot help it!—I cannot!"
"You have been in the country,—have you not?" said Lefevre, beginning with a resolve to get at something.
"I have just come back," said Julius. "My man told me you had called."
"Yes. My mother wrote in a state of great anxiety about you, and asked me to go and look at you. She said that she and my sister had seen a good deal of you lately; that you began to look unwell, and then ceased to appear, and she was afraid you might be ill."
This was put forth as an invitation to Julius to expound not only his own situation, but also his relations with Lady and Miss Lefevre, but Julius took no heed of it. He merely said, "No; I was not ill. I only wanted a little change to refresh me,"—and walked back to the window to lave himself in the air.
"Well," continued Lefevre, "since I called to see you, I have had an adventure or two. You never look at a newspaper except for the weather, and so it is probable you do not know that I had brought to me yesterday afternoon another strange case like that of the young officer a month ago,—a similar case, but worse."
"Worse?" exclaimed Julius, dropping into the chair by the window, and glancing, as a less preoccupied observer than the doctor would have remarked, with a wistful desire at the door.
"Much worse—though, I believe, from the same hand," said Lefevre. "A lady this time,—titularly and really a lady,—Lady Mary Fane, the daughter of Lord Rivercourt."
"Oh, good heavens!" exclaimed Julius, and there were manifest so keen a note of apprehension in his voice and so deep a shade of apprehension on his face, that Lefevre could not but note them and confirm himself in his suspicion of the intimate bond of connection between him and the author of the outrage. He pitied Julius's distress, and hurried through the rest of his revelation, careless of the result he had sought.