"I fell," she mumbled, and her words seemed to strike him. "I went for a drive. Coming back—here at the hotel—I fell from the cab—getting out. I got up to the bedroom. And it happened. I sent for a doctor—not Boussingault. He treated me, and I paid him. The nurse, too. They said it was easy—They said I would be all right in a week.—I thought I was—But I have suffered—O, Jim, Jim! Don't look like that! Don't, please, think——"
She crashed to the floor at his feet.
Then Stainton realised something of the bodily agony that had been hers while he was absent and of the mental agony that had driven her on their mad dash through Switzerland to Austria and Italy, the mental agony that lashed her now. He put aside, for the moment, his own suffering. He stooped and took her up and held her in his arms and, pressing her head against his breast and holding her sobbing body tight to his, tried to murmur broken, unthought words of comfort.
Gradually, very gradually, she grew a little quieter.
"My dear, my dear," he said in a voice so hoarse that he scarcely knew it for his own, "why did you keep torturing yourself? You should have had rest, and instead——Why didn't you tell me? Why?"
"I was afraid," she said, simply.
"Dearie!" he cried. "Of me?"
Her words were a fresh stab.
"Yes. I knew how much you wanted——And I was afraid."
"You needn't have been. You see it now. You needn't have been. Tell me what I can do for you, dear. Only tell me."