And before the
news could reach her mother in other ways, Marcia herself went in to tell
her what she must know.
Lady Coryston had had a bad night, and was sitting up in bed gazing
straight before her, her gaunt hands lying listlessly on a pile of letters
she had not yet opened. When Marcia came in, a white ghost, still shivering
under nervous shock, her mother looked at her in sudden dismay. She sprang
forward in bed.
"What!--Marcia!--have you seen Arthur?"
Marcia shook her head.
"It's not Arthur, mother!"
And standing rigid beside her mother's bed, she told her news, so far as
those piteous deaths at Redcross Farm were concerned. Of her own position,
and of the scene which had passed between herself and Newbury the preceding
day, she said not a word.
On the facts presented to her, Lady Coryston was first bewildered, then
irritated. Why on earth should Marcia take this morbid and extravagant
interest in the affairs of such people? They were not even tenants of the
Coryston estates! It was monstrous that she should have taken them up
at all, and most audacious and unbecoming that she should have tried
to intercede for them with the Newburys, as she understood, from her
daughter's hardly coherent story, had been the case.
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