"Quite."
"Every moment may be of importance. But the moment he is safe I will hurry back to see to your welfare here. I shall lie at Warrington to-night, and I will tell the doctor at Wynsloe to come over first thing in the morning to see how you are going on. Ah, Mrs. Lee, you are ready for us?"
"Ay. The oak parlour is ready, sir. I'll get you what I con to eat, but you'll have to put up wi' short farin' to-night, sin' you didna let me know you were coming. To-morrow----"
"What you can to-night as quickly as possible. Lady Susan is tired out, and I return as soon as I have eaten. See that the post-boy gets something too."
"Yo're non stopping?" asked the old woman in surprise.
"No, no, I told you so," he said, with the irritation of a tired man. "Come, my dear!" and he offered his arm to Lady Susan, and led her slowly away down the stone passage to a small room in the west front, where the rush of the storm was barely heard.
An hour later Sir Denzil was whirling back before the gale on his way to London, as fast as two tired horses and a none too amiable post-boy could carry him. His usual serene self-complacency was disturbed by many anxieties, and he carried not a little bitterness, on his own account, at the untowardness of the circumstances which had dragged him from the ordered courses of his life and sent him posting down into the wilderness, without even the assistance of his man, upon whom he depended for the minutest details of his bodily comfort.
"A most damnable misfortune!" he allowed himself, now that he was alone, and he added some further unprofitable moments to an already tolerably heavy account in cursing every separate person connected with the matter, including a dead man and the man who killed him, and an unborn babe and the mother who lay shivering at thought of its coming.