"Of course I'm hurt. I'm shaken all to pieces; every bone in my body's broken; there's not a scrap of life left in me. Do you suppose I'm the sort of creature who can be thrown about like a shuttlecock and not be hurt?"
Something, however, in her tone suggested that her troubles might after all be superficial.
"If you will calm yourself, Agatha, perhaps you may find that your injuries are not so serious as you imagine."
"They couldn't be, or I should be dead. The worst of it is that this all comes of my flying across London to take that twopenny-halfpenny bag to that ridiculous young woman of yours."
He started.
"The bag! Agatha! have you found it?"
"Of course I've found it. How do you suppose I could be tearing along with it in my hands if I hadn't?" The volubility of her utterance pointed to a rapid return to convalescence. "It seems that I gave it to Jane, or she says that I did, though I have no recollection of doing anything of the kind. As she had already plenty of better bags of her own, probably most of them mine, she didn't want it, so she gave it to her sister-in-law. Directly I heard that, I dragged her into a cab and tore off to the woman's house. The woman was out, and, of course, she'd taken the bag with her to do some shopping. I packed off her husband and half-a-dozen children to scour the neighbourhood for her in different directions, and I thought I should have a fit while I waited. The moment she appeared I snatched the bag from her hand, flung myself back into the cab--and now the cab has flung me out into the road, and heaven only knows if I shall ever be the same woman I was before I started."
"And the bag! Where is it?" She looked about her with bewildered eyes.
"The bag? I haven't the faintest notion. I must have left it in the cab."
Mr. Roland rushed out into the street. He gained the vehicle in which Mrs. Tranmer had travelled. It seemed that one of the shafts had been wrenched right off, but they had raised it to what was as nearly an upright position as circumstances permitted.