For a woman of ordinary nerve and brain, Mrs. Tomlett decidedly showed herself wanting in self-possession at the question. It seemed to scare her. Looking here, looking there, looking everywhere like a frightened bird, she mumbled out some indistinct answer. Miss Thornycroft had seen her so on occasions before, and as a girl used to laugh at her.
"When did it happen, Mrs. Tomlett?"
"Last week, miss; that is, last month--last fortnight I meant to say," cried Mrs. Tomlett, hopelessly perplexed.
"What was the accident?" continued Miss Thornycroft. "Well, it was a--a--a pitching of himself down the stairs, miss."
"Down which stairs? This house has no stairs."
Mrs. Tomlett looked to the different points of the room as if to assist her remembrance that the house had none.
"No, miss, true; it wasn't stairs. He got hurted some way," added the woman, in a pang of desperation. "I never knowed clear how. When they brought him home--a carrying of him--his head up, as one might say, and his legs down, my senses was clean frightened out o' me: what they said and what they didn't say, I couldn't remember after no more nor nothing. May be 'twas out o' the tallet o' the Red Court stables he fell, miss: I think it was."
Miss Thornycroft thought not; she should have heard of that. "Where was he hurt?" she asked. "In the leg, was it not?"
"'Twas in the arm, miss," responded Mrs. Tomlett. "Leastways, in the ankle."
The young lady stared at her as a natural curiosity. "Was it in both, Mrs. Tomlett?"