"I wanted to see you, Toby," she said. "Just to tell you how, how----" And she paused a moment thinking that her insistence on the fact that her accident was no one's fault but her own, might seem suspicious--"how glad I was to see Lily yesterday!" she went on. "I wonder if she would come to see me; ask her. But you must go now; I can't talk. Just ring the bell as you go out. I want my maid."
She stretched a hand from under the bedclothes to him, and he took it with a sudden fright, feeling its cold feebleness.
"Good-bye, Kit," he said. "Get better soon."
She could not reply, for another sword of pain pierced her, and he went quickly out, ringing the bell as he passed the mantelpiece.
Jack was still in the hall when he came downstairs again, and he looked up in surprise at the speed of Toby's return.
"She fell down, she told me," he said. "You were quite right, Jack--not a word."
Jack had not time to reply when Kit's maid hurried downstairs into the hall.
"Her ladyship is in great pain, my lord," she said. "She told me to send for the doctor at once."
Jack rang the bell and looked up at Toby blankly, appealingly.
"Go into your room, Jack," he said. "I'll send for the doctor, and do all that."
A footman was sent off at once for Kit's doctor, and Toby sat down at a writing-table in the hall and scribbled a note to his wife, to be taken by a messenger at once to his house. If Lily was not at home, he was to find out where she had gone and follow her. The note only contained a few words:
"MY DEAREST: Kit is in trouble--worse than I can tell you. Come at once to her. She wants you.
When he had written and sent this, he went back to Jack. The latter was sitting at his table, his face in his hands, doing nothing. Toby went up to him.
"Come, Jack," he said, speaking as if with authority, "make an effort and pull yourself together. Get to your work, or try to. There is a pile of letters there you haven't looked at. Read them. Some may want answers. If so, answer them. I have sent for Kit's doctor, and for Lily."
"It isn't fit that Lily should come here," he said.
Toby thought of Kit's visit the afternoon before, and Lily's refusal to him to say anything of what it had been about. That it had been private was all she would tell him, and not about money. And as they were sitting alone in the evening he thought he saw her crying once.