“It all seems dark around me!” she moaned.
“There,” he said soothingly. “Wrap him in that dressing-gown and take him to your room. I must attend to this woman.”
In spite of his wife’s objections, however, he went downstairs to look for the doctor. The room and the terrace were both empty; he could see the party riding, like a group of scuttled birds, at a hard gallop down the lane at the end of the lawn.
“They might have waited to find out!” he muttered. Great drops of rain splashed on the bricks about him. They had fled from his house even in the teeth of the storm. He returned hastily to the nurse, bathed the wound in the neck, and gave her some liquor from his flask. When she had gone to her room, he went downstairs once more, without crossing the hall to his wife’s room. That took a kind of courage which he did not have. Servants had lit the lamps in the long room and pulled the shades. Outside the rain swept across the terrace and beat upon the French windows. He waited, listening, irresolute, unwilling to take the future in his hands.
Finally he detected a dragging step on the stairs. His wife came slowly toward him, her erect young woman’s head crushed under a weight of fear.
“They have gone,” she sighed with relief.
“Yes, they cleared out in the face of the storm!”
“I am so glad!”
“Sit down, dear,” he urged, taking her cold hands.
She disengaged herself from him before he could kiss her, and sat down beside the long table in a straight stiff chair. She clasped her hands tightly and looked at her husband with a face of misery and horror.