"Here, Prance, I want you," said the surgeon. "I was about to ask you to come to me."
The woman turned at once, quite readily, as it appeared, and quite unruffled. She stood calm, cool, quiet, before Mr. Pym, in her neat black gown and silk apron, the black ribbon strings of her close cap tied underneath her chin. Not a shade of change was observable on her impassive face, not the faintest hue of emotion lighted her pale, sharp features.
"This is a very dreadful thing, Prance," he began.
"It is, indeed, sir," she answered in her measured tones, which, if they had not any demonstrative feeling in them, had certainly no irreverence.
"How did the doors get fastened on the unfortunate boy?"
Prance paused for about the hundredth part of a minute. "I was not aware they were fastened, sir." And the answer appeared to be really genuine.
"Honour says they were. Upon returning from the kitchen, and attempting to enter by this door"--pointing to the one still closed on the miserable scene--"she found she could not enter. The inside button had been turned during her absence below. Did you go into the nursery yourself and fasten it? No one else, I believe, is in the habit of frequenting the nursery but you and Honour."
"I did not go, sir. I did not go into the nursery at all during the afternoon. Master George was downstairs with his mamma, and I had nothing to take me into it. If the button was turned in the manner described, I should think Master Benja must have got upon a chair and done it himself."
Still the same impassive face; and still, it must be acknowledged, the same air of truth.
"That may be," remarked Mr. Pym. "The same thought had occurred to me. But there's another point not so easily got over. Honour says that the other door was also fastened, the one leading into the dressing-room--was bolted on the outside."