"We had better send for a doctor," she whispered fiercely. "I shall fetch one myself if you do not!"
"I know quite as much as any doctor," he said; "the man is not dead, or dying, or likely to die. I wonder if we could move him on to that sofa!"
Together they managed it somehow. Mr. Sabin, in the course of his movements to and fro about the room, was attracted by the sight of the dogcart still waiting outside. He frowned, and stood for a moment looking thoughtfully at it. Then he went outside.
"Are you waiting for Lord Wolfenden?" he asked the groom.
"Yes, sir. I set him down here nearly an hour ago. I had no orders to go home."
"Lord Wolfenden has evidently forgotten all about you," Mr. Sabin said. "He left by the back way for the golf course, and I am going to join him there directly. He is not coming back here at all. You had better go home, I should think."
There was a little trampling up of the gravel, and Wolfenden's dogcart rapidly disappeared in the distance. Mr. Sabin, with set face and a hard glitter in his eyes went back into the morning room. Helène was still on her knees by Wolfenden's prostrate figure when he entered. She spoke to him without looking up.
"He is a little better, I think; he opened his eyes just now."
"He is not seriously hurt," Mr. Sabin said; "there may be some slight concussion, nothing more. The question is, first, what to do with him, and secondly, how to make the best use of the time which must elapse before he will be well enough to go home."
She looked at him now in horror. He was always like this, unappalled by anything which might happen, eager only to turn every trick of fortune to his own ends. Surely his nerves were of steel and his heart of iron.
"I think," she said, "that I should first make sure that he is likely to recover at all."
Mr. Sabin answered mechanically, his thoughts seemed far away.
"His recovery is a thing already assured," he said. "His skull was too hard to crack; he will be laid up for an hour or two. What I have to decide is how to use that hour or two to the best possible advantage."
She looked away from him and shuddered. This passionate absorption of all his energies into one channel had made a fiend of the man. Her slowly growing purpose took to itself root and branch, as she knelt by the side of the young Englishman, who only a few moments ago had seemed the very embodiment of all manly vigour.