"Lucy—Miss Kemp! Would you ask your mother if she could come to the Priory as soon as possible? There's been an accident there—a fire—and I fear Mrs. Rebell has been badly burnt."
His voice filled Lucy with varying feelings—joy that he had instinctively turned to the Grange for help, horror and concern at what he had come to tell.
"Mother's away," she cried in a troubled tone. "She and father have gone over to Berechurch for three nights. Should I be of any use? I shouldn't be a moment getting ready."
In less than ten minutes she joined him, and together they hastened through a seldom opened door giving access from the garden of the Grange into the Priory Park. Soon Oliver was hurrying her up the path, walking so quickly that she could scarcely keep up with him, towards the great silent mass of building the top windows of which, those which lay half hidden by the Tudor stone balcony, were now strangely lit up, forming a coronal of light to the house beneath.
"What happened?" she asked breathlessly.
"It's impossible to say what happened," Boringdon spoke in sharp preoccupied tones, "Mrs. Rebell seems to have been reading in bed and to have set fire to a curtain. She behaved, as she always does, with great good sense, and she and McGregor—heaven knows how—managed to put out the flames; not, however, before the fire had spread into the sitting-room next her bedroom. McKirdy, it seems, has always insisted that there should be buckets of water ready on every landing." Oliver would have scorned to defraud his enemy of his due. "When the whole thing was over, then they all—that stupid old Mrs. Turke and the maids—saw that she was badly burnt!"
The speaker's voice altered; he paused for a moment, and then continued, "They sent for McKirdy, who, as bad luck would have it, went back to his own house last week, and found him away, for he's been helping that Scotch doctor at Halnakeham with a bad case. Then they came on to me. Even now they're like a pack of frightened sheep! Madame Sampiero knows nothing of what has happened, and Mrs. Rebell is extremely anxious that her god-mother should not be agitated—why, she actually wanted to go down herself to tell her that everything was all right."
Lucy listened in silence. How Oliver cared, how dreadfully he cared! was the thought which would thrust itself into the girl's mind. "Is Mrs. Rebell very badly hurt?" she asked. "Oh! I wish that mother was here. Have you sent for another doctor?"
"I don't know how far she is hurt," he muttered, "her arm and shoulder, some of her hair—" then, more firmly, "No, she won't let me send for anyone but McKirdy. Besides, by the time we could get a man over from Halnakeham, he would certainly be back. But it will be everything to her to have you there, if only to keep order among the frightened, hysterical women."