said; "but I wouldn't ask
her about it, yet. Of course we don't know what the result will be, Mrs.
Newbolt. I can't help saying I'm anxious. Mr. Curtis had better be sent
for. Telegraph him in the morning." He went off, thinking to himself,
"She must have gone into the country to do it. If she'd tried the river,
here, and scrambled out, she wouldn't have been so frightfully chilled.
I wonder what's up?"

Everybody wondered what was up, but Eleanor did not enlighten them; so
the three interrupted revelers could do nothing but think. Johnny's
thoughts, as he sat down in the parlor among the Welsh-rabbit plates,
keeping the fire up, and waiting in case he might be needed, were even
briefer than the doctor's: "Tried to commit suicide."

Edith, standing in the upper hall, listening to Mrs. Newbolt at
Eleanor's bedside, exclaiming, and repeating her dear mother's ideas
about catching cold, and offering more hot-water bottles, had her
thoughts: "I won't go into the room--she would hate to see me! The
doctor said she had fallen into some water. Did she--do it on purpose?
Oh, _was_ it my fault?" Edith's heart pounded with terror: "Was it what
I said to her in the garden that made her do it?"

Mrs. Newbolt, in a blue-flannel dressing gown, and in and out of the
spare room with sibilant whispers of anxiety, had, for once, more
thoughts than words; her words were only, "I've always expected it!" But
her thoughts would have filled volumes! Mrs. Newbolt had put her hair
in order for the night, and now her crimping pins made the shadow of her
head, bobbing on the ceiling, look like a gigantic spider.

Eleanor had just one hazy thought: "I tried ... I tried--and I failed."

Other people, however, didn't feel so sure that she had failed. She
"looks like death," Mrs. Newbolt told Edith the next morning. "We've got
to find Maurice! Edith, why do you suppose she--did it?"

"Oh, but she _didn't_!" Edith said. "What sense would there be--"

"Don't talk about 'sense'! Eleanor never had any. I've telegraphed your
mother to come. I wonder how Bingo is? She understands her. The ashman
has broken my new ash barrel; I don't know what this country is comin'
to!"

Then she went upstairs to try to understand Eleanor herself. "Eleanor,
what happened?"

"Nothing. I'm going home this afternoon."

"Indeed you are not! You're not goin' out of this house till Maurice
comes and gets you! _What_ happened?" she demanded again.

"I fell. Into some