“Is there nothing I can do to help you?” he asked.
“Nothing—nothing more, I should say,” she replied.
“And—Miss Western, you are not going to sit up all night,” he went on—“promise me you will not; you are not fit for it, and that is not the way to prepare yourself for, perhaps, weeks of nursing.”
“I am truly quite rested and fresh,” she said. “It is very kind of you to think of it. I shall not do anything foolish. Good-night again.”
He did not and had not attempted to shake hands, nor had Mary offered to do so.
“He refused my hand the last time I offered it,” she said to herself. “But on the whole, perhaps, what wonder?”
Dr Brandreth, approaching Hathercourt some ten minutes later, was surprised to meet a dog-cart driving off in an opposite direction. But it passed too quickly for even his quick eyes to identify it.
“Whose trap can that be?” he said to his boy.
“Dunno, sir. Not so very onlike the Romary dogcart neither,” was the reply.
“Impossible!” said the doctor. And in his own mind he wondered why Mary Western had not prosecuted the acquaintanceship with the Cheviotts, so strangely begun.