Mrs. Lakeman had got her dramatic moment.
Margaret was aghast. "Oh!" she exclaimed. "Is it Lena? Has anything happened to her?"
Mrs. Lakeman struggled for utterance; when she gained it her words were thick, her voice desperate. "I have come to ask you for her life!" she said.
"Me?"
"Your telegram has killed her."
"Oh!" Margaret's face blanched, for she saw what was coming. Mrs. Lakeman raised herself, and sat down on the sofa and took Margaret's hands, and looked at her with eyes as strangely blue as they were mocking.
"Margaret," she said, "I have done a desperate thing; but my child has been ill, she has been fretting and waiting for her lover—for the boy who has always been her lover. She can't bear separation from him. Yesterday morning I sent for him, and told him she was dangerously ill; at five o'clock your telegram—"
"It was Tom's telegram."
Mrs. Lakeman was impatient at the interruption. "Tom's telegram, then—came. By an accident it was given into her hands instead of mine, and a quarter of an hour later I was bending over her wondering if she would ever open her eyes again. Tom has been ours—all his life," Mrs. Lakeman went on, vehemently; "he and she have grown up together; he has always loved her; he has done everything for us; they have never been three days apart till we went to Scotland the other day. She worships him, and it has been the one hope of my life to see them married. She has never dreamed of anything else; he is the air she breathes and the world she lives in. When that telegram came yesterday it struck her like a death-blow."