“Good-bye, my own dear love. God guard you and bring you to me in His own good time,” were his last words.
She flashed a radiant smile at him.
“Till to-morrow!” she said, and with that she left him, passing like a wraith, quite oblivious of the deep interest and sympathy of the officials, and of the prison chaplain who accompanied her and Austin to the outer gates, but with tactful delicacy refrained from speaking to her. He too thought, “it was better so.”
Winnie and little Miss Culpepper, pale-faced and red-eyed, were waiting anxiously for her return. She smiled on them too, as they took off her outdoor wraps and lovingly tended her.
“Yes, I will have some tea—just a cup. And I’m so tired I’m going to lie down for an hour or two. You see it won’t do for me to be a wreck when Roger comes home. That’s nice. Thank you, darlings. You are good to me. If I don’t wake before nine will you wake me then?”
Like a child she submitted to be wrapped in a rest-gown and tucked up under the eiderdown on her bed. When Winnie stole in to look at her presently she was fast asleep.
“What does she mean about Roger coming home, and that we are to wake her at nine o’clock?” Winnie asked Austin when she rejoined the others.
“I don’t know. She’s been like that, poor girl, ever since we were with Sir Robert. He was brutal to her—brutal! I wish we had not gone, but you know how she insisted on doing so. She just stood and looked around the room, and I guess something snapped in her poor brain. She said something then about ‘the ninth hour,’ and it’s a queer coincidence, but directly after, old man Thomson, Sir Robert’s valet, followed us and asked me to go back there at nine o’clock—though why, he wouldn’t say, and I can’t surmise. But I’m going!”
“Did you tell her about that?”
“No. He asked me not to. And it didn’t seem any use to talk to her, poor girl; she was just insensible, as you saw her now, like an animated corpse.”