“Can you both spend a week with me on your way home?” it said. “Welcome any day; the sooner the better.”
It came from an old friend, Imogen’s godmother, and as there had been vague talk of the visit it was not altogether unexpected; not at least too surprising that Mrs Hume should have telegraphed.
“Can I send an answer back?” asked Imogen’s mother.
“Yes, ma’am. I was to say the messenger is waiting. There are telegraph forms in the envelope case on the writing-table,” was the maid’s reply.
And in another moment the answer was forthcoming—a warmly-worded acceptance, announcing the Wentworths’ arrival some time the following afternoon.
This settled, Mrs Wentworth, who did not often act with such promptitude and decision, relapsed into nervousness and depression. She established herself on a chair beside the door of communication with Imogen’s room, longing for and yet dreading her awaking.
For, strange as it may seem, the girl was really asleep, and soundly so. It was her first experience of violent emotion, and, coming on the top of the past days of tension and excitement, it had completely exhausted her. At first she had meant to lie still, and, if need were, feign sleep till time sufficient for Mrs Hume’s telegram should have elapsed, but real slumber had come, saving her, not improbably, from the illness that would not have been an abnormal result of all she had gone through. But at last, half an hour or so before the dressing-gong sounded, she awoke. For a moment or two she was in a chaos of bewilderment; then by degrees, as this cleared a little, she became conscious of one overmastering impression; the latest and strongest on her brain before she fell asleep. They—she and her mother—must leave, must seek shelter somewhere, anywhere, at once. Then the remembrance of the commission she had, in her desperation, entrusted to Robin Winchester returned.
“Has it—has the?” she began to say, raising herself to look about her. But her full senses revived before she said more. The room was quite in darkness, except for the faint red glow of the slumbering fire. It might have been the middle of the night; nay more, days might have passed, for all she knew, since that terrible afternoon.
“Perhaps I have been very ill, and am only now beginning to get better,” she thought. But no, though her head was dizzy and ached a good deal, she did not feel weak or exhausted. Then she had on her usual dress, the same dress she had worn all day. With a sigh almost of regret Imogen had to decide that nothing very remarkable had happened. She was still in the world of ordinary doings, and she must face what lay before her.
A dark figure, aroused by even the half-audible words she had begun to utter, crossed the room to the bedside.