"But I don't see her in it," I rejoined.
"Oh, she must be in it, Charles. Perry is on the box."
Perry was getting down, but was not quite so quick in his movements as a slim young footman would be. He rang the door-bell, and I was fetched down to him. In two minutes afterwards I had disclosed the news to my wife, and brought Perry upstairs that she might herself question him. The tears were coursing down her cheeks.
"Don't take on, Miss Annabel," said the man, feeling quite too much lost in the bad tidings to remember Annabel's new title. "There's not the least bit of danger, ma'am; Mr. Close bade me say it; all is sure to go on well."
"Did you bring the carriage for me, Perry?"
"Yes, ma'am, I did. And it was my mistress herself thought of it. When Mr. Close, or Hatch—one of 'em it was, I don't know which—told her they were going to send me for you, she said, 'Let Perry take the carriage.' Oh, ma'am, indeed she is fully as well as she could be: it was only at first that she seemed faintish like."
Annabel went back in the carriage at once. I promised to follow her as early in the evening as I could get away. Relying upon the butler's assurance that Mrs. Brightman was not in the slightest danger; that, on the contrary, it would be an illness of weeks, if not of months, there was no necessity for accompanying Annabel at an inconvenient moment.
"It is, in one sense, the luckiest thing that could have happened to her," Mr. Close remarked to me that evening when we were conversing together.
"Lucky! How do you mean?"
"Well, she must be under our control now," he answered in significant tones, "and we were fearing, only to-day, that she was on the point of breaking out again. A long spell of enforced abstinence, such as this, may effect wonders."