"You feel that now, because of the shock and strain, and because, at the best of times, you are not strong. By and by——"
"Ah! but I don't think there will be any by and by," she interrupted quietly, "and I am not sorry. Life has brought so much more pain than joy—that—I am not either sorry or afraid. Only I wish I could have done more for my world, before I went out of it," she added half whimsically, half sadly, a little smile breaking over her face.
"Perhaps what you have been, has had even more influence over your world than what you have done," Fergusson said quietly; "it is not always the most apparently active people, who have the greatest effect on their fellows."
She smiled at him again, but she did not continue the conversation, allowing it to drift away to other topics, until Fergusson, having given her his orders, and promised to send her a new medicine on the morrow, took his departure.
"What a baffling mystery the woman is," he reflected, as he walked across the garden to the door in the wall. "I am not more curious than the average man, but I confess she has aroused my curiosity. What has her life been? And why has she——" At this point in his meditations he opened the door, and was on the point of passing out into the road, when he became aware of a figure, leaning against the wall close to the door itself. The last remnants of daylight had almost died away, the rain was falling in pitiless torrents, and Fergusson, peering through the twilight gloom, recognised with horror the face of Christina Moore, looking terribly white and exhausted in the dimness. Her crouching position seemed to indicate that she was tired out, and when Fergusson went quickly to her side, and put a hand on her shoulder, she shrank back and shivered from head to foot, lifting such frightened eyes to his, that he peered this way and that, thinking she must be fleeing from some dastardly pursuer. But, excepting for the moaning of the wind in the trees, and the swishing of the rain, no sound broke the silence, and save the girl herself, there was no sign of any other human being in the lane.
"What has happened?" he asked, speaking very quietly, to calm her overmastering excitement; "come into the house out of the rain, and tell me what is the matter. Why, you are wet through," he added sharply, as he put his hand through the girl's arm, and drew her up the flagged path to the front door.
"Yes, I'm wet through," she answered in slow, mechanical tones. "I—I believe it has rained ever since I left the station."
"The station? Have you walked from the station?" They were standing in the hall now, and by the light of a hanging lamp in its centre, Fergusson could see that the wet was running from Christina's garments, and dropping in small pools on the floor, and that the look of exhaustion was deepening on her face.
"Yes, I walked," she said. "I hadn't much money. I was afraid I shouldn't have enough for the cab. They might have called me a thief again—and—I am not a thief—indeed, indeed, I am not." Her eyes met his once more, with so strange and dazed a look, that he began to wonder whether some great shock had unhinged her brain, but he only said, more quietly than before:—
"I am quite sure you are not a thief. I will call Elizabeth, and she will take care of you. Does Mrs. Stanforth expect you?"