"What else could we do? We couldn't leave him there at the wharf, could we? And where else could we have taken him? Not back to his chambers, certainly!"
There was silence. The carriage jogged on in the darkness through London's ugly outskirts, and the two watchers listened solicitously to the heavy breathing of their patient. It was a comfort to Max, a great one indeed, to have Carrie for a companion on this doleful journey. But she was not the same girl, now that she had duties to attend to, that she had been over that _tête-à-tête_ dinner, or even during the journey in the hansom. He himself felt that he now counted for nothing with her, that he was merely the individual who happened to occupy the opposite seat; that her interest, her attentions, were absorbed by the unconscious man by her side.
"Why didn't you become a hospital nurse?" asked Max, suddenly.
He heard rather than saw that she started.
"That's just what I thought of doing," she answered, after a little pause. "I'm just old enough to enter one of the Children's Hospitals as a probationer. They take them at twenty."
"I see. Then you couldn't have tried before."
"I should think you were cut out for the work, if only you are strong enough," said Max, with warmth. "You seem to do just the right thing in just the right way."
"I've had plenty of experience," said Carrie, shortly, breaking in upon rhapsodies which threatened to become tender. "I did a lot of visiting among poor people who had no one to nurse them when I lived with Miss Aldridge. Down in these parts, the East End, you get practice enough like that, I can tell you!"
"But the treatment of a drowning man--that requires special knowledge, surely!"
"Yes, but down by the river is just the place to get it. He's the fifth person I've seen taken out for dead in the time I've lived there. Three out of the five were dead. The other two, a boy and a woman, were brought around."
"Do you know--can you guess--how he got into the water?"
"Wait--wait till he can tell us himself," said she, hurriedly. "It's no use guessing. Perhaps it was an accident, you know."
"You know as well as I do that that villainous old Mrs. Higgs is at the bottom of the affair."
Carrie bent over Dudley, to assure herself that, if not asleep, he was at least unconscious of what was passing. Then she turned to Max.