"You can tell your aunt, Sara," the doctor quietly said, as he stepped to the door of the room, and vanished.
"Well, I'm sure!" angrily cried Miss Davenal. "My brother is polite tonight. He might have answered me."
Sara pushed from her the piece of cake she had been trying to eat, and went close to her aunt, speaking in her slowest and most distinct tones.
"Don't you see that papa has had a great shock--a blow, Aunt Bettina? Lady Oswald is dead."
Poor Miss Davenal, never very quick at comprehending, confused the information together in the most helpless manner. "What do you say? Lady Oswald has had a blow? Who's dead?"
"Aunt, aunt, you will understand me if you won't be impatient. Lady Oswald is dead. And I say it is a great blow to papa. I can see that it is."
Miss Davenal heard now, and looked perfectly scared. "Lady Oswald dead! It cannot be, Sara."
"She had to undergo some operation in consequence of the accident, and papa gave her chloroform, hoping of course to lighten the pain, and she never rallied from it."
Miss Davenal seized Sara's hands in her dismay. Her senses were sharpened and she had heard perfectly; her face had turned white. Neal, who had come in, looked at her as he stood near the door, and wondered whether she was going to faint.
"Sara, I don't like that chloroform. I have told the doctor so, often and often. They should never try it upon me. Who gave it her?"
"Papa," replied Sara, never dreaming but she was correct in saying so. "Aunt Bettina, he gave it her for the best."
"Best! of course he gave it for the best--nobody disputes that. But I don't like it: I never did like it. Chloroform is come into fashion now--an improvement on the old state of things, they call it, as they call the railways--and I don't deny that it spares pain; but I do not like it."
By and by Sara went to the consulting-room. The doctor was pacing it uneasily.
"You are going to bed early, is it ten o'clock?"
"Yes, I think it is past ten. Goodnight, dear papa. I hope you will be better in the morning."
"I have felt nothing like it since the death of Richard. Goodnight, my child."
It was not so much the death in itself that was affecting Dr. Davenal, as the appalling reflection that it had been, in a manner, wilfully caused. The knowledge weighed on his heart like a stone.