“Yes; she was the nurse, but she didn't—”
Checking herself, Mrs. Dinneford rose on one arm and looked at Edith in a frightened way, then said, hurriedly,
“Oh, it's dead, it's dead! You know that; and the woman's dead, too.”
Edith sat motionless and silent as a statue, waiting for what more might come. But her mother shut her lips tightly, and turned her head away.
A long time elapsed before she was able to read in her mother's confused utterances anything to which she could attach a meaning. At last Mrs. Dinneford spoke out again, and with an abruptness that startled her:
“Not another dollar, sir! Remember, you don't hold all the winning cards!”
Edith held her breath, and sat motionless. Her mother muttered and mumbled incoherently for a while, and then said, sharply,
“I said I would ruin him, and I've done it!”
“Ruin who?” asked Edith, in a repressed voice.
This question, instead of eliciting an answer, as Edith had hoped, brought her mother back to semi-consciousness. She rose again in bed, and looked at her daughter in the same frightened way she had done a little while before, then laid herself over on the pillows again. Her lips were tightly shut.