“ ... The next turn ... can’t go on.... Let the orchestra play.... Tell the audience she isn’t badly hurt ... turned my blood cold.... Hadn’t time to shout.... Who dropped the damned thing?... Must have broken her spine.... Rather anyone than The Girlie Girl.”
The doctor had risen from his examination and was coming towards her. She nerved herself for a shock; but she could hear her own heart thumping against her ribs.
“Not—not——” She could not get the words out of her dry lips.
The doctor gravely shook his head. “No, she’s alive. Bad injury to the spine, I should say. Get her to a hospital”—then taking in the quality of the woman who had said she was the sister-in-law—“or to her home at once and call in a specialist.”
Claudia read the look in his eyes, which was compounded of pity and deep emotion. She had seen that look once in the eyes of a man who had been entrusted with the task of breaking the news of her husband’s death to a poor woman on their country estate.
“Is she—very bad?” she whispered. “Will she die?”
“I’m afraid not—yet.”
Claudia reeled up against a piece of scenery. She never forgot that moment. The orchestra playing a rag-time melody, the stout woman sobbing, the regret in the eyes of the doctor.
“You mean——”
“It’s not likely she will ever move off her bed again. She’s paralysed.”