He returned half-way down the corridor, and entered his own dressing-room to change his coat and brush his hair. The bedroom was in silence.
"Hallo!" he said, without opening the connecting door. "Hallo, Priscilla, what are you about that you haven't come down yet?"
He heard her voice say, "Jack, come to me--come," but he scarcely knew the voice to be hers; it was the voice of a stranger.
She was standing in the centre of the room, still in her travelling-dress--she had only taken off her hat.
"I say, what's the matter?" he began at the moment of entering. But then he stood still, as she turned her face to him. "Good God! Priscilla--dearest, what is the matter? You are as pale as death."
He thought that she was about to fall--she was swaying as a tall lily sways in a breath of air. He hurried to her and put his arm about her.
"My God! You are ill. You have been doing too much. You have been overdoing it at that beastly election, and this is the reaction. Pull yourself together, darling."
She seemed trying to speak, but no word would come. She gasped. Her attempt to speak was choking her. At last she managed to make herself audible. Clutching at his shoulders rather wildly and with her face rigid, pushed forward close to his--with wild eyes and cheeks as pale as moonlight, she cried in gasps:
"Jack--Jack--my own Jack--my husband--swear to me that you will stand by me--that you will never leave me whatever may happen."
"My darling! Calm yourself! Tell me what has happened."
"What? What? Only one thing--one thing! I saw his face in the crowd--close to the carriage. He was not drowned--he's alive--he has returned."
"What do you mean?--he?--who? God above--not--not that man?"
"Marcus Blaydon--I tell you I saw his face. He smiled--such a smile! There is no chance of a mistake. He is alive, and he has returned."
The Framsby Glee and Madrigal Meistersingers were giving a spirited rendering of "Auld Lang Syne."
The moment that she had spoken he flung a protective arm about her--his left arm; his right arm was free, and he had turned his face away from her with a jerk and had alert eyes fixed upon the door. His man's instinct had forced him into the protective attitude of the primeval man when threatened by a sudden danger of another man or another animal. He had not in that second realized the details of the danger that her words had disclosed; his action was automatic--the inherited instinct of the cave-dweller ancestor.