“Where is my uncle?” she asked, as she stood in the open doorway.
Basset looked over her shoulder. He saw that the room was empty. “He may have gone to look for us.”
“And Toft?”
“And Toft, too, I suppose.”
“But why should my uncle go to look for us?” she asked, aghast at the thought—he troubled himself so little for others, he lived so completely his own life!
“He might,” Basset replied. He stood for a moment, thinking. Then—for the time they had forgotten their quarrel—“You had better get something to eat and go to bed,” he said. “I will send Mrs. Toft to you.”
She had not the strength to resist. “Very well,” she said. “Are you going to look for them?”
“Perhaps Mrs. Toft will know where they are.”
She took her candle and went slowly up the narrow winding staircase that led to her room and to Etruria’s. As she passed, stair by stair, the curving wainscot of dull wood which so many generations had rubbed, she carried with her the picture of Basset standing in thought in the middle of the hall, his eyes on the doorway that gaped on the night. Then a big man with a genial face usurped his place; and she smiled and sighed.
A moment later she went into Etruria’s room to learn how she was, and caught the girl rising from her knees. “Oh, Miss,” she said, coloring as she met Mary’s eyes, “if we had not been there!”