She shook her head and drew her hands away. "I wasn't hurt. I—I slipped and fell and struck my head on the pavement. Don't let anybody telephone. I can go alone. Please—please let me go! I must go! I can't stay here."
"But you mustn't go alone." I turned to Selwyn. "Mr. Thorne will go with you. Do you live far from here?"
"Not very. It's close enough for me to go by myself. He mustn't go with me." The words came stumblingly, and again I saw the quick, frightened look she gave Selwyn, a look in which was indecision and appeal, as well as fear, and I saw, too, that his face flushed as he turned away.
With quick movement the girl got up. From her throat came a sound hysterical and choking, and, putting her hand to it, she looked first at me and then at Mrs. Mundy, but at Selwyn she did not look again. "I'm going. Thank you for letting me come in." Blindly she staggered to the door, her hands outstretched as if to feel what she could not see. At it she turned and in her face was that which keeps me awake at night, which haunts and hurts and seems to be crying to me to do something which I know not how to do.
"You poor child!" I started toward her. "You must not go alone." But before I could reach her she fell in a heap at the door, and as one dead she lay limp and white and piteously pretty on the floor.
CHAPTER VI
I don't understand Mrs. Mundy. She acts so queerly about the girl we found on the street last night. She put her to bed, after she had recovered from her fainting spell, on a cot in the room next to her own, but this morning she told me the girl had gone, and would tell me nothing else.
When Selwyn, who had picked her up and laid her on the couch, asked if he should not get a doctor, Mrs. Mundy had said no, and said it so positively that he offered to do nothing else. And then she thanked him and told him good night in such a way he understood it was best he Should go.
At the front door he called me. With his back to it he held out his hands, took mine in his, crushed them in clasp so close they hurt.
"Danny," he said, "why do you torment me so? You don't know what you're doing, living where such things are possible as have taken place tonight; where any time you may be—"