A look of great anxiety crossed Barbara's face. "My god-mother is very brave. I do not think she will give much thought to the fire, but I hope he will tell her that I am not really hurt. Perhaps, after Doctor McKirdy has come, I can go down, and show her that there is really nothing the matter."
As she spoke, she winced. "Are you much hurt?" asked Lucy in a low voice, and her shrinking eyes again glanced at the sheet of wadding which wholly concealed Mrs. Rebell's arm, left breast, and one side of her head.
Barbara looked at her rather piteously. "I don't know," she said; "It hurt dreadfully at first, but now I feel nothing, only a slight pricking sensation." She repeated, "It hurt dreadfully till they fetched Mr. Boringdon, and then he found—I don't know where or how—the oil and wadding, which he made poor old Mrs. Turke put on. He was so good and kind!" She smiled at the girl, a friendly smile, and the look in her eyes brought a burning blush to Lucy's cheeks.
There was a pause; then Lucy, having taken off her hat and jacket, lighted the fire.
"Miss Kemp," Barbara's voice sank to a whisper, "I want you to do something for me. That fire which you have so kindly lighted has made me think of it. Will you go into my room, two doors from here, and bring me a packet of letters you will find in my dressing-table drawer? The drawer is locked, but the key is in my purse. When you have brought it, I want you to burn the letters, here, before me," and as Lucy was turning to obey her, she added, "Take one of the candles. Mr. Boringdon said the two rooms were to be left exactly as they are, and everything must be dripping with water, and in fearful confusion."
Lucy never forgot her little expedition down the dark passage, and the strange scene which met her eyes in the two rooms which had evidently been, till that night, as neat, as delicately clean, as was her own at the Grange. Well was it for poor Barbara that she had so few personal treasures. But the dressing-table had escaped injury save from the water, which in the bedroom had actually done more harm than the fire.
When she got back into the room where Mrs. Rebell was sitting, it seemed to Lucy that Barbara had changed in the short interval—that she looked, not well, as she had done when Lucy had first seen her half an hour before, but very, very ill. The colour now lay in patches on her cheek, and she watched with growing feverishness the burning of the few letters, from each of which, as she put it in the bright crackling fire, Lucy averted her eyes, a fact which Mrs. Rebell, in spite of her increasing dizziness and pain, saw and was grateful for.
"Miss Kemp," the speaker's voice was very low, "come here, close to me. Someone may come in, and I am feeling so strange——Perhaps I may forget what I want to tell you. You know Mr. Berwick?" Lucy was kneeling down by the arm-chair, and Barbara put her right hand on the girl's slight shoulder—"But of course you do, I was forgetting the ball——Why, he danced with you. If I die, only if I die, promise me——" an agonised look came into the dark eyes—
"I promise," said Lucy steadily; "only if you die——"
"If I die, you are to tell him that I cared as he wished me to care,—that when I sent him away, and in the letters I have written to him since, I said what was not true——"