ohnny ran to the telephone.

"No," Eleanor whispered.

But nobody paid any attention to her. Johnny, at the telephone, was
telling Mrs. Newbolt's doctor to _hurry_! Mrs. Newbolt herself had run,
wheezing, to open the spare-room bed and get out extra blankets, and
fill hot-water bottles; then, somehow or other, she and Edith got
Eleanor upstairs, undressed her, put her into the big four-poster, and
held a tumbler of hot whisky and water to her lips. By the time Doctor
James arrived she had begun to shiver violently; but she was still
silent. The trolley ride into town, with staring passengers and a
conductor who thought she had been drinking, and tried to be jocose, had
chilled her to the bone, and the gradual dulling of thought had left
only one thing clear to her: She mustn't go home, because Maurice might
possibly be there! And if he was, then he would _know_! So she must
go--somewhere. She went first to Mrs. O'Brien's, climbing the three long
flights of stairs and feeling her way along dark entries to the old
woman's door. She stood there shuddering and knocking; a single gas jet,
wavering in the draughty entry, made her shadow lurch on the cracked
plaster of the wall; it occurred to her that she would like to put her
frozen hands around the little flame to warm them. Then she knocked
again. There was no answer, so, shaking from head to foot, she felt her
way downstairs again to the street, where the reflection of an
occasional gas lamp gleamed and flickered on the wet asphalt. "I'll go
to Auntie's," she thought.

She had just one purpose--to get warm! But she was so dazed that she
could never remember how she reached Mrs. Newbolt's; probably she
walked, for there were no cabs in that part of town and no car line
passed Mrs. Newbolt's door. The time after she left Mrs. O'Brien's was a
blank. Even when she had swallowed the hot whisky, and began to feel
warmer, she was still mentally benumbed, and couldn't remember what she
had done. She did not notice Johnny Bennett; she saw Edith, but did
not, apparently, understand that she was staying in the house. When the
doctor came she was as silent to him as to everybody else.

He asked no questions. "Keep her warm," he said, "and don't talk to
her."

Mrs. Newbolt, going to the door with him, palpitating with fright, said,
"_We_ don't know a thing more about what's happened than you do! She
just appeared, drippin', wet!"

"She has evidently fallen into some water," he