But she was so weak that she staggered and would have fallen had not the woman sprung forward and saved her.
"Don't go on in that way," said the woman, brusquely. "You are to remain here until you are—well. It won't be over a fortnight longer. You've been here some time."
"But I will not remain here!" exclaimed Ida May, excitedly. "I shall leave at once!"
The woman turned the key in the lock, coolly removed it, and slipping it into her pocket, remarked:
"This is a sanitarium. It is not for patients to say when they shall leave here. That is the doctor's business."
"But tell me, why does any one wish to keep me here?" cried Ida May, piteously. "No one in the whole world has any interest in me."
"I am surprised to hear you say that," declared the woman, grimly, with something very much like a sneer in her harsh voice.
The words, the tone in which they were uttered, and the look which accompanied them, cut the poor girl to the heart.
"Let me tell you about the man who brought me here," cried Ida, trembling like a leaf, believing it must certainly be her sworn enemy, Frank Garrick, who had taken cruelly taken advantage of her to abduct her when she swooned on the boarding-house stoop.
"I have no time to listen to you," exclaimed the woman. "We are strictly forbidden to talk to the patients or listen to their tales of woe, which are always woven out of whole cloth."