But no one, now they came to think of it, had seen her.
Henrietta, who had put away two slices of toast while Tuttle was upstairs, said: "Very well, Miss Nash," and Beau went back to her breakfast. Henrietta rolled up her napkin and caught Froken's eye, but Froken was already rising from table, her face anxious.
"You and I will go to the gymnasium, Froken," Henrietta said, and they went out together, the rest of the Staff trailing after them but not following them out to the gymnasium. It was only on the way upstairs to make her bed that it occurred to Lucy to think: "I could have told them that she wasn't in the gymnasium. How silly of me not to think of it." She tidied her room-a task that the students were expected to perform for themselves and which she thought it only fair that she likewise should do for herself- wondering all the time where Rouse could have disappeared to. And why. Could she suddenly have failed again this morning to do that simple boom exercise and been overtaken by a crise des nerfs? That was the only explanation that would fit the odd fact of any College student missing a meal; especially breakfast.
She crossed into the "old house" and went down the front stairs and out into the garden. From the office came Henrietta's voice talking rapidly to someone on the telephone, so she did not interrupt her. There was still more than half an hour before Prayers; she would spend it reading her mail in the garden, where the mist was rapidly lifting and a shimmer had come into the atmosphere that had been so dead a grey. She went to her favourite seat at the far edge of the garden overlooking the countryside, and it was not until nine o'clock that she came back. There was no doubt about the weather now: it was going to be a lovely day; Henrietta's «tragedy» was not going to happen.
As she came round the corner of the house an ambulance drove away from the front door down the avenue. She looked at it, puzzled; but decided that in a place like this an ambulance was not the thing of dread that it was to the ordinary civilian. Something to do with the clinic, probably.
In the drawing-room, instead of the full Staff muster demanded by two minutes to nine o'clock, there was only Miss Lux.
"Has Rouse turned up?" Lucy asked.
"Yes."
"Where was she?"
"In the gymnasium, with a fractured skull."