Mr Thurston looked at her very anxiously, the hard look melting out of his face.
“Take care you do not overrate your strength,” he said gently.
Eugenia smiled, but said nothing. Then she stood up, and was about to try if she could walk, when Gerald stopped her.
“Wait one instant,” he exclaimed, and before she had the least idea what he meant, he was back again with a glass of wine.
“Drink that, or at least half of it,” he said. “I found it on the sideboard. It must be getting near dinner-time.”
Eugenia did as he told her, and then he let her go.
“Good night; I don’t think I shall come down to dinner, and thank you again very, very much, and—and please remember,” were her last words.
Ten minutes later Sydney appeared, dressed for dinner, with a rather troubled face. She was anxious about Eugenia, she told Gerald; it looked as if she had caught a chill somehow—she had persuaded her not to come down again, but to go straight to bed.
“But talking of chills,” she went on, hastily, “this room is enough to freeze one. What can it be? Why, actually, the window is open. My dear Gerald, what can you be made of to have sat here without finding it out?”
Mr Dalrymple was dining with a bachelor friend that evening. It was pretty late when he got home to his wife, but he found her wide awake, and evidently in better spirits than she had been for the last day or two.