The Three Sisters Part 33

It came over her that she was too late, that she would see rows of yellow blinds drawn down in the long front of Rowcliffe's house.

The blinds were up. The windows looked open-eyed upon the Green. She noticed that one of them on the first floor was half open, and she said to herself, "He is up there, in that room, dying of diphtheria."

The sound of the bell, m.u.f.fled funereally, at the back of the house, fulfilled her premonition.

The door opened wide. The maid stood back from it to let her pa.s.s in.

"How is Dr. Rowcliffe?"

Her voice sounded abrupt and brutal, as it tore its way from her tense throat.

The maid raised her eyebrows. She held the door wider.

"Would you like to see him, miss?"

"Yes."

Her throat closed on the word and choked it.

Down at the end of the pa.s.sage, where it was dark, a door opened, the door of the surgery, and a man came out, went in as if to look for something, and came out again.

As he moved there in the darkness she thought it was the strange doctor and that he had come out to forbid her seeing Rowcliffe. He would say that she mustn't risk the infection. As if she cared about the risk.

Perhaps he wouldn't see her. He, too, might say she mustn't risk it.

While the surgery door opened and shut, opened and shut again, she saw that her seems him was of all things the most unlikely. She remembered the house at Upthorne, and she knew that Rowcliffe was lying dead in the room upstairs.

And the man there was coming out to stop her.

Only--in that case--why hadn't they drawn the blinds down?

XXIX

She was still thinking of the blinds when she saw that the man who came towards her was Rowcliffe.

He was wearing his rough tweed suit and his thick boots, and he had the look of the open air about him.

"Is that you, Miss Cartaret? Good!"

He grasped her hand. He behaved exactly as if he had expected her. He never even wondered what she had come for. She might have come to say that her father or one of her sisters was dying, and would he go at once; but none of these possibilities occurred to him.

He didn't want to account for her coming to him. It was natural and beautiful that she should come.

Then, as she stepped into the lighted pa.s.sage, he saw that she was bareheaded and that her eyelashes were parted and gathered into little wet points.

He took her arm gently and led her into his study and shut the door.

They faced each other there.

"I say--is anything wrong?"

"I thought you were ill."

She hadn't grasped the absurdity of it yet. She was still under the spell of the illusion.

"I? Ill? Good heavens, no!"

"They told me in the village you'd got diphtheria. And I came to know if it was true. It _isn't_ true?"

He smiled; an odd little embarra.s.sed smile; almost as if he were owning that it was or had been true.

"_Is_ it?" she persisted as he went on smiling.

"Of course it isn't."

She frowned as if she were annoyed with him for not being ill.

"Then what was that other man here for?"

"Harker? Oh, he just took my place for a day or two while I had a sore throat."

"You _had_ a throat then?"

Thus she accused him.

"And you _did_ sit up for three nights with Ned Alderson's baby?"

She defied him to deny it.

"That's nothing. Anybody would. I had to."

"And--you saved the baby?"

He shrugged his shoulders. "I don't know. Some thing or other pulled the little beggar through."

"And you might have got it?"

"I might but I didn't."

"You _did_ get a throat. And it _might_ have been diphtheria."

Thus by accusing him she endeavored to justify herself.