"Are you smothered, child? Get up. Now, mark me: you must not say a word to Mr. Edwin Barley of what happened at the summer-house. Do not mention it at all—to him, or to any one else."
"But suppose I am asked, Selina?"
"How can you be asked? Philip King is gone, poor fellow; George Heneage is not here, and who else is there to ask you? You surely have not spoken of it already?" she continued, in a tone of alarm.
I had not spoken of it to any one, and told her so. Jemima had questioned me as to the cause of my terror, when I ran in from the wood, and I said I had heard a shot and a scream I had not courage to say more.
"That's well," said Selina.
She sent me to rest, ordering Jemima to stay by me until I was asleep. "The child may feel nervous," she remarked to her, in an undertone, but the words reached me. And I suppose Jemima felt nervous, for one of the other maids came too.
The night passed; the morning came, Sunday, and with it illness for Mrs. Edwin Barley. I gathered from Jemima's conversation, while she was dressing me, that Selina had slept alone: Mr. Edwin Barley, with his brother and some more gentlemen, had been out a great part of the night looking for George Heneage. It was so near morning when they got back that he would not go to his wife's room for fear of disturbing her.
I ran in when I went downstairs. She lay in bed, and her voice, as she spoke to me, did not sound like her own.
"Are you ill, Selina? Why do you speak so hoarsely?"
"I feel very ill, Anne. My throat is bad—or my chest, I can scarcely tell which: perhaps it is both. Go downstairs, and send Miss Delves to me."