"She'd come back, if anything had happened," said Julie, some ten minutes later.
"Who—Emma?" Mrs. Arbuthnot was not alarmed. "Oh, surely!" she yawned, and drew her wraps about her.
"It's all over now. But I suppose it will burn for hours. I think I'll turn in again," she said.
"I've had enough, too!" Julie said, not quite easy herself, but glad to find the other so. "Let's decamp."
She wheeled the invalid carefully back to her room, where both women were still talking when a bell-boy knocked, bringing a message from the doctor. A woman had been hurt; he would be busy with her for an hour.
"Who was it?" Julie asked him, but the boy, obviously frantic to return to the fascinations of the fire, didn't know.
It was more than an hour later that the doctor came in. Julie had been reading to Ann. She shut the book.
"Jim! What on earth has kept you so long?"
"Frighten you, dear?" The doctor was very pale; he looked, between the dirt and disorder of his clothes, and the anxiety of his face, like an old man.
"Some one was hurt?" flashed Julie, solicitous at once.