“If I were you, I wouldn’t send it back to her. If she’s the sort of woman you’ve described her to be, it’s quite likely she’ll never discover that she sent it you by mistake.”
“Ought I to put it in the fire?”
“I don’t think you ought to do that. It doesn’t belong to you. You’ve no right to destroy it. Wait a day or two, dearest, and see what happens. She may ask you if you have got the letter? Then you can give it back to her. I’ll keep it if you like, Angus. We’ll put it in an envelope and I’ll address it to myself. If I keep it in the secret drawer of my old desk over there, only you and I will know where it is.”
VII
A long, long week went by, and it was now the evening of the 16th of November. Nurse Bradfield had been out for an hour after lunch, and while she was out Ivy had “looked after” Jervis. She made a point of doing this at some time of her day, though it was always overfull.
Being both good humoured and good natured, Nurse Bradfield fell in easily with any plan proposed by her patient’s wife. She had become very fond of Jervis Lexton, and, though aware of Ivy Lexton’s selfishness and innate frivolity and levity, she was yet attracted, in spite of herself, by the younger woman’s beauty, and what was in very truth an exceptional charm of manner, and what some of Ivy’s friends called her cheeriness.
Nurse Bradfield would have been surprised indeed could she have looked into Ivy Lexton’s mind, and seen how often and how anxiously that mind was occupied with herself.
Often the nurse would be touched and gratified by the consideration with which she was treated, and her comfort studied. It was no wonder that she, on her side, never even thought of insisting on her right to a certain amount of rest and exercise. She was no longer a young woman. She had few friends in London, and this day nursing job with a pleasant young couple was an agreeable interlude in her often anxious and hardworking life.
So on this early afternoon Ivy and Jervis had what her patient afterwards weakly described to his nurse as a quiet, nice little time together.
Then Ivy had gone out to a bridge-party, and now she had just come in, leaving herself barely time enough to dress and go out again.
To the young day-maid who hovered, timidly, admiringly, about her, Mrs. Lexton sadly expressed her regret at being in too great a hurry to see Mr. Lexton, even for a minute.
Hurry was the word today. She was hurrying over her dressing as she never hurried before, and, while she made up with feverish haste, there was a strange look on her lovely face. She even noticed that she did not look “quite the thing,” as she gazed at herself in the looking-glass, and she tried, but it was a failure, to smile, reassuringly, at herself.
She had turned away from the dressing-table and had just slipped her frock over her head, when there was a knock at the bedroom door, and Nurse Bradfield came in.
“I feel anxious about Mr. Lexton,” she said in a worried voice. “I don’t like his colour. Will you phone for the doctor, Mrs. Lexton? I hate leaving Mr. Lexton, even for a moment!”
Ivy of course murmured a word of assent. Then it was as if her heart bounded in her breast. Had it come at last—her order of release?
She felt a spasm of terror shake her being. Also a sensation of abject fear of hard-faced, cold-mannered Dr. Berwick.
This morning she had discovered the envelope containing the prescriptions which she believed she had sent the doctor a few days ago. And as she stared at it, puzzled, she suddenly remembered—remembered, with a sharp stab of dismay, thrusting Gretorex’s letter into an empty envelope which she herself, in the early days of Jervis’s illness, acting on Dr. Lancaster’s fussy advice, had marked “Prescriptions.” Fool, fool that she had been!
There was that in the lovely, sensitive face of her patient’s wife that caused the nurse to run forward and put her arms round her.
“Don’t be so upset, Mrs. Lexton! We’ll have the doctor round in a few minutes. Though he’s not my sort, Dr. Berwick is very clever, and maybe he’ll think of something to bring him round—quick! But do please now phone at once!” And she almost ran out of the room.
But Ivy did not go over to the side of the bed where stood the telephone. Instead, she went and sat down again in front of the pretty dressing-table. She shrank with terror from the thought of sending for Dr. Berwick “all in a hurry, like this.”
Oh! What had made her give that large, that dangerous, dose of the—the stuff, to Jervis today? He had felt weak, weak and what he oddly called “spent.” So she had mixed him a stiff brandy and soda. And the doing of that had seemed such a good opportunity for … Ivy did not end the sentence, even to herself.
Again, why wasn’t Roger Gretorex in London? What a fool she had been to let him go for a long weekend down to Sussex to his tiresome mother. There was such support in his unquestioning love, in his adoring devotion, especially as he no longer asked her, with pleading, ardent, burning words of longing, to go to that horrid little house in Ferry Place.
At last, slowly, and with dragging steps, she went over to the telephone and rang up the doctor’s house.
To her relief it was a woman’s voice, kindly, gentle, which answered.
“My husband is away. He won’t be back till tomorrow morning. Mr. Lexton less well? I’m so sorry. I’ll have a message sent round at once to Dr. Singleton,
