"Matthew! You here!" she said at last.
"So you are not gone yet!" was the answer. "It is well. I have something to say to you. Follow me."
Then the ghastly procession began to move slowly forward again, and, preceded by one of the baronet's servants, it crossed the hall and went in the direction of the library.
Olive stood aside to let it pass--stood aside with clasped hands, and with her heart on her lips, as it were, longing, yearning for one word, one look of kindness or recognition from her cousin, but in vain. Matthew Kelvin's eyes were set straight before him, and he looked neither to the right hand nor the left, till he reached the library, where the servant at once wheeled forward a large easy chair, into which he sank, breathless and exhausted.
Olive, following silently behind, was the last to enter the room. She shut the door behind her, and stood quietly in the background, unheeded for the time by everyone. Vague, dark forebodings were at work in her heart. What did it all mean? she asked herself again and again. That strange look in her cousin's eyes, the way he spoke to her, the presence of Dr. Whitaker--all signs and tokens of something that boded no good to her. Had everything been discovered? She shivered from head to foot as this question put itself to her.
As soon as Mr. Kelvin was seated, the servant and Pod Piper left the room.
"Why, bless my heart! is that you or your ghost?" cried Sir Thomas, starting up from his chair and rubbing his eyes.
He had been taking forty winks surreptitiously--a little weakness in which he indulged three or four times a day, without ever permitting himself to acknowledge that he had been asleep.
Gerald, in the act of reaching a book from one of the upper shelves, turned with the volume in his hand as Kelvin and the others came into the room.
"He will be better in a little while," said Dr. Whitaker to the baronet, who had crossed the room, and was now standing, with his hands under his coat-tails and pursed-up lips, gazing down with compassionate eyes at the half-conscious man before him.