As he spoke, looking straight at her, he was startled by a change in her face. Its sparkle of archness suddenly faded, and her eyes dilated with astonishment. Evidently she had not heard what he said. She was looking at some object in the crowded street. Involuntarily she put her hand on his arm, as though she could not stand steadily. He drew her to one side to lean against a doorway, but with a resentful gesture she freed herself and began to make her way down the pavement. He kept close to her, but there was no need to ask what had alarmed her. Elias Constantine, astride of a cart-horse, was a figure easily to be discerned above the heads of foot-passengers, and at his first following of her gaze Borlase too saw him. But he had not seen them yet and was glancing eagerly from side to side. He was red with heat and looked scared and angry. The horse had evidently been unloosed from a cart and mounted at once. Its foamy mouth and streaming flanks spoke of a gallop.
'Make him see us,' said Anna.
He was attracting attention, and various voices were shouting the addresses of the different doctors, one of whom it was taken as a matter of course that he wanted. Borlase seized Anna's parasol and swung it above his head. Elias caught the movement. A look of mingled relief and more urgent anxiety possessed his face as his eyes fell on Anna. He dug his spurless heels into the horse's flanks, sending it forward with a plunge that cleared his course, and in another moment pulled up by her.
'She's off,' he said hoarsely.
'Who?' said Anna. Her voice was scarcely audible.
'Clo, t' missis, that limb o' the devil.'
'Oh, hush!' said Anna.
She put her hand over her eyes as though to collect her thoughts for grappling an emergency. But Borlase saw her stricken look. He had seen it before. He knew what must have happened at Old Lafer—only one calamity could make Anna Hugo look as she looked now. Yet when she took her hands from her eyes she managed to smile. It wrung his heart. He had experience of that smile on a woman's face which hides the deepest wound and buries its own grief in hopes of assuaging another's.
'Come this way,' he said, placing her hand on his arm and turning down a by-street; 'every one will observe us here and some officious fool be volunteering to find Mr. Severn. As it happens, I know where he is and that he is safe from hearing of this for the present at least.'
'Do you really?' she said. Her voice trembled but she looked up at him with unutterable gratitude.