The poor old lady looked vaguely about, as if Miss Nash might be playing hide-and-seek behind the furniture. Her face was veined and ghastly. She hardly comprehended the blow which was falling upon her, but she shivered hopelessly, and thought she should understand soon, and looked up at Judith with a mute appeal in her dim eyes.
"Where can she be?" The girl echoed Miss Crawford's words half to herself. "What ought we to do?"
"I can't think why she wrote and told them not to meet her on Wednesday," said the old lady. "So timid as Emmeline always was, and she hated travelling alone! Oh, Judith! Has she run away with some one?"
A cold hand seemed to clutch Judith's heart, and her face was like marble. Bertie! Oh no—no—no! Not her brother! This treachery could not be his work. Yet "Bertie" flashed before her eyes as if the name were written in letters of flame on Mr. Nash's open note, on the wall, the floor, the ceiling. It swam in a fiery haze between Miss Crawford and herself.
She stood with her hands tightly clasped and her lips compressed. It seemed to her that if she relaxed the tension of her muscles for one moment Bertie's name would force its way out in spite of her. And even in that first dismay she was conscious that she had no ground for her belief but an unreasoning instinct and the mere fact that Bertie was away.
"Help me, Judith!" said Miss Crawford pitifully. She trembled as she clung to the girl's shoulder. "I'm not so young as I used to be, you know. I don't feel as if I could stand it. Oh, if only your mamma were here!"
Judith answered with a sob. Miss Crawford's confession of old age went to her heart. So did that pathetic cry, which was half longing for her who had been so many years at rest, and half for Miss Crawford's own stronger and brighter self of bygone days. She put her arm round the schoolmistress and held up the shaking, unsubstantial little figure. "If Bertie has done this, he has killed her," said the girl to herself, even while she declared aloud, "I will help you, dear Miss Crawford. I will do all I can. Don't be so unhappy: it may be better than we fear." But the last words, instead of ringing clear and true, as consolation should, died faintly on her lips.
Something was done, however. Miss Crawford was put on the sofa and had a glass of wine, while Judith sent a telegram in her name to Mr. Nash. But the poor old lady could not rest for a moment. She pulled herself up by the help of the back of the couch, and sitting there, with her ghastly face surmounted by a crushed and woebegone cap, she went over the same old questions and doubts and fears again and again. Judith answered her as well as she could, and persuaded her to lie down once more. But in another moment she was up again: "Judith, I want you! Come here—come quite close!"
"Here I am, dear Miss Crawford. What is it?"
The old lady looked fixedly at the kneeling figure before her. "I've nobody but you, my dear," she said. "You are a little like your mamma sometimes."