She shut her eyes before she answered, and stood holding to the back of a seat; then she opened her eyes, saw Eaton and recognized him and sat down in the seat where Avery had been sitting.
"Dr. Sinclair says we will know in four or five days," she replied to Avery; she turned then directly to Eaton. "He thought there probably was a clot under the skull, and he operated to find it and relieve it. There was one, and we have done all we can; now we may only wait. Dr. Sinclair has appointed himself nurse; he says I can help him, but not just yet. I thought you would like to know."
"Thank you; I did want to know," Eaton acknowledged. He moved away from them, and sat down in one of the seats further down the car. Connery came out from the drawing-room, went first to one end of the car, then to the other; and returning with the Pullman conductor, began to oversee the transfer of the baggage of all other passengers than the Santoine party to vacant sections in the forward sleepers. People began to pass through the aisle; evidently the car doors had been unlocked. Eaton got up and left the car, finding at the door a porter from one of the other cars stationed to warn people not to linger or speak or make other noises in going through the car where Santoine was.
As the door was closing behind Eaton, a sound came to his ears from the car he just had left—a young girl suddenly crying in abandon. Harriet Santoine, he understood, must have broken down for the moment, after the strain of the operation; and Eaton halted as though to turn back, feeling the blood drive suddenly upon his heart. Then, recollecting that he had no right to go to her, he went on.
CHAPTER VIII
SUSPICION FASTENS ON EATON
As he entered his own car, Eaton halted; that part of the train had taken on its usual look and manner, or as near so, it seemed, as the stoppage in the snow left possible. Knowing what he did, Eaton stared at first with astonishment; and the irrational thought came to him that the people before him were acting. Then he realized that they were almost as usual because they did not know what had happened; the fact that Basil Santoine had been attacked—or that he was on the train—still had been carefully kept secret by the spreading of some other explanation of the trouble in the car behind. So now, in their section, Amy and Constance were reading and knitting; their parents had immersed themselves in double solitaire; the Englishman looked out the window at the snow with no different expression than that with which he would have surveyed a landscape they might have been passing. Sinclair's section, of course, remained empty; and a porter came and transferred the surgeon's handbag and overcoat to the car behind in which he was caring for Santoine.
Eaton found his car better filled than it had been before, for the people shifted from the car behind had been scattered through the train. He felt a hand on his arm as he started to go to his seat, and turned and faced Connery.
"If you must say anything, say it was appendicitis," the conductor warned when he had brought Eaton back to the vestibule. "Mr. Dorne—if a name is given, it is that—was suddenly seized with a recurrence of an attack of appendicitis from which he had been suffering. An immediate operation was required to save him; that was what Dr. Sinclair did."