"For God's sake, tell me at once! Tell me what this is...."
Still silence! She could hear through it sobs here and there in the crowd, and then two women pointed to where an elderly man who looked like a doctor came from a doorway close by. She
heard the hysterical woman break down outright, and her removal by friends, and then the strong Scotch accent of the doctor-like man making a too transparent effort towards an encouraging tone.
"There's nae reason to anteecipate a fatal tairmination, so far. I wouldna undertake myself to say the seestolic motion of the heart was...." But he hesitated, with a puzzled look, as Rosalind caught his arm and hung to it, crying out: "Why do you tell me this? For God's sake, speak plain! I am stronger than you think."
His answer came slowly, in an abated voice, but clearly: "Because they tauld me ye were the girl's mither."
In the short time that had passed since Rosalind's mind first admitted an apprehension of evil the worst possibility it had conceived was that Vereker or her husband was in danger. No misgiving about Sally had entered it, except so far as a swift thought followed the fear of mishap to one of them. "How shall Sally be told of this? When and where will she know?"
Two of the women caught her as she fell, and carried her at the Scotch doctor's bidding into a house adjoining, where Fenwick had been carried in a half-insensible collapse that had followed his landing from the cobble-boat in which he was sculled ashore.
"Tell me what has happened. Where is Dr. Vereker?" Rosalind asks the question of any of the fisher-folk round her as soon as returning consciousness brings speech. They look at each other, and the woman the cottage seems to belong to says interrogatively, "The young doctor-gentleman?" and then answers the last question. He is looking to the young lady in at the Coffeehouse. But no one says what has happened. Rosalind looks beseechingly round.
"Will you not tell me now? Oh, tell me—tell me the whole!"