'Ah, there is Hugh!' cried Lady Helen. 'How I hope he has found the carriage!'
At that moment Rose slipped on a spray of gardenia, which had dropped from the bouquet of some predecessor. To prevent herself from falling downstairs, she caught hold of the stem of a brazen chandelier fixed in the balustrade. It saved her, but she gave her arm a most painful wrench, and leant limp and white against the railing of the stairs. Lady Helen turned at Agnes's exclamation, but before she could speak, as it seemed, Mr. Flaxman, who had been standing talking just below them, was on the stairs.
'You have hurt your arm? Don't speak—take mine. Let me get you downstairs out of the crush.'
She was too far gone to resist, and when she was mistress of herself again she found herself in the library with some water in her hand which Mr. Flaxman had just put there.
'Is it the playing hand?' said Lady Helen anxiously.
'No,' said Rose, trying to laugh; 'the bowing elbow.' And she raised it, but with a contortion of pain.
'Don't raise it,' he said peremptorily. 'We will have a doctor here in a moment, and have it bandaged.'
He disappeared. Rose tried to sit up, seized with a frantic longing to disobey him, and get off before he returned. Stinging the girl's mind was the sense that it might all perfectly well seem to him a planned appeal to his pity.
'Agnes, help me up,' she said with a little involuntary groan; 'I shall be better at home.'
But both Lady Helen and Agnes laughed her to scorn, and she lay back once more overwhelmed by fatigue and faintness. A few more minutes, and a doctor appeared, caught by good luck in the next street. He pronounced it a severe muscular strain, but nothing more; applied a lotion and improvised a sling. Rose consulted him anxiously as to the interference with her playing.