d of an 'accident'? How serious is it? When was it?
Why didn't they let me know before?" and so on; all the futile, anxious,
angry questions which a man asks himself under such circumstances. But
suddenly, while he was asking these questions, another question
whispered in his mind; a question to which he would not listen, and
which he refused to answer; but again and again, over and over, it
repeated itself, coming, it seemed, on the rhythmical roll of the
wheels--the wheels which were taking him back to Eleanor! "If--if--if--"
the wheels hammered out; "_if_ anything happens to Eleanor--"? He never
finished that sentence, but the beginning of it actually frightened him.
"Am I as low as this?" he said, frantically, "speculating on the
possibility of anything happening to her?" But he was not so low as
that--he only heard the jar of the wheels: "If--if--if--if--"

When he reached the station to which he had told Mrs. Newbolt to reply,
he rushed out of the car into the telegraph office, and clutched at the
message before the operator could put it into its flimsy brown envelope;
as he read it he said under his breath, "Thank God!" It was from Mary
Houghton:

Accident slight. Slipped into water. All right now except bad cold.

Maurice's hand shook as he folded the message and stuffed it into his
pocket. He had the sense of having escaped from a terror--the terror of
intolerable remorse. For if she had not been "all right," if, instead of
just "a bad cold," the dispatch had said "something had
happened"!--then, for all the rest of his life he would have had to
remember how the wheels had beaten out that terrible refrain:
"If--if--if--"

So he said, "Thank God."

All that day, while Maurice was hurrying back to Mercer, Eleanor lay
very still, and when Mrs. Newbolt or Mrs. Houghton came into the room
she closed her eyes and pretended to be asleep. Edith did not come into
the room; so, in a hazy way, Eleanor took it for granted that she had
left the house. "I should think she would!" Eleanor thought; "she could
hardly have the face to stay in the same house with me." But she did not
think much about Edith; she was absorbed in deciding what she should say
to Maurice. Should she tell him the truth?--or some silly story of a
walk to their meadow? The two alternatives flew back and forth in her
mind like shuttlecocks. There was one thing she felt sure of: that
letter--which Mrs. Houghton had brought from her desk, which Maurice