“D’you feel you’ve made him see that everything’s over between you?,” he asked.
“I’ve told him so again and again, but he simply pays no attention,” she cried tremulously. “He keeps going back to my promise, as though the only shadow of difference between us was that he was so slow and I was so impatient. He says he’ll marry me as soon as Lord Poynter’s offer is confirmed, and I can publish the engagement as soon as I like. I told him I didn’t want to, I said I wasn’t engaged to him any longer; then we started again at the beginning... Eric, don’t let’s talk about it.”
They returned to the letters, and he went on dictating until he discovered that Ivy was paying no attention to him. One hand supported her head; with the other she was drawing little patterns on the blotting paper. Suddenly the pencil slipped from her fingers; he saw her eyes close and her lips whiten, as she bit them.
“My child—!”
“It’s nothing! I shall be all right in a minute, but I felt so funny all of a sudden.”
“Are you in pain?”
“I am, rather....”
She bit her lips at a new spasm, and Eric put his fingers on her pulse. Then he picked her up and carried her into his room, leaving her there for a moment, while he gave orders for a bed to be made up in his spare room and telephoned for Dr. Gaisford to come round at once.
“I’m really all right, I just felt funny,” she protested, when he told her what he had done. “I think meeting Johnnie, you know... I don’t want a doctor.”
She tried to sit upright, then fell back, covering her face with her hands. Eric took up his stand half-way between the window and the bed until he saw a car stopping at the door. The sight of the doctor’s familiar, burly figure heartened him, and it was only as he ran downstairs and found himself, white-faced and agitated, being mistaken for the patient, that he realized how frightened he had been.