"Yes, sir." She cast a swift look at the bed, and then hastily averted her pale-brown eyes. "Mr. Cheniston--he--he won't die, will he, sir? I mean, not immediate, like?"
"No, he will not die immediately," said Anstice reassuringly. "All you have to do is to sit here, beside the bed"--he had noticed how she kept her distance from the aforesaid bed, and placed her in the chair he had vacated with a firm pressure there was no resisting--"and watch Mr. Cheniston carefully. If he shows signs of waking come for me. But don't disturb him in any way. You understand?"
The girl said, rather whimperingly, that she did; and with a last glance at Cheniston, who still lay sunk in a dreary stupor, Anstice went quietly from the room in search of his comrades in misfortune.
He found them in the room in which he had first seen Iris; and he joined the conclave without loss of time.
"Oh, here you are!" Iris broke off in the middle of a sentence and came forward. "Mrs. Wood, this is Dr. Anstice; and this"--she turned to a tall, clean-shaven man dressed, rather unconventionally, in the clothes of a clergyman--"is Mr. Wood. Here is Mr. Garnett, and that is all, with the exception of Molly."
She drew forward a child of about Cherry Carstairs' age, a pale, fragile child in whose face Anstice read plainly the querulousness of an inherited delicacy of constitution.
"She ought really to be asleep," said Mrs. Wood, a short, rather good-looking woman of a florid type, whose subdued voice and air were at variance with the cheerful outline of her features. "But somehow night and day have got mixed up at present--in fact, my watch has stopped, and I don't know what time it is."
"It is just ten o'clock, Mrs. Wood." It was Roger Garnett who volunteered the information; and as Anstice turned to discover what manner of man the speaker might be he was relieved to find that the young Australian wore an unmistakably militant air. He was of average height, with powerful shoulders; and in his blue eyes burned a lust for battle which was in no way diminished by the fact that his left arm was bound up just below the elbow.
"Brute dotted me one there," he explained casually as he saw Anstice's glance fall on the bandage. "Thought at first he'd broken a bone, but he hadn't. It was only a flesh wound, and Mrs. Wood did it up in the most approved St. John style!"