"That's a great compliment, Job, and I appreciate it. But," with a shake of the head, "I'll have other work to do," and he wondered grimly where that work might lie.
Mollie took him straight up to Mrs Carew's room, where she lay just as she had sunk down on the bed when he sent her away the previous morning.
"She's nivver spoke nor moved since she dropped down there yes'day," whispered Mollie impressively. "I covered her up, but she took no notice. An' I brought her up her dinner and her supper but she's never ate a bite."
"Get me a cup of hot milk with an egg and a glass of sherry beaten up in it, Mollie," he whispered back. "And I'll see if I can induce her to take it. You did quite right to send for me," and Mollie hurried away with a more hopeful face.
Elinor lay there with her eyes closed and a rigid, stricken look on her white face, a picture of hopeless despair. But Wulfrey's quick glance had caught the flutter of her heavy lids, and the gleam of terrified enquiry that had shot through them, as they came into the room, and he understood.
He bent over her and whispered, "I have made it all right, Elinor. You need have no further fears——"
"They will not hang me?" she whispered, and looked up into his face with all the terrors of the night still in her woful eyes.
"No one will know anything about it unless you tell them yourself. You will eat something now, and then you had better lie still. Get some sleep if you can or you will make yourself ill. If you fell ill you might say things you should not, you know."
She struggled up on to one elbow. "You are quite sure they will not hang me?" she whispered again.
"Quite sure, unless you are so foolish as to tell them all about it."