Mrs. Cameron, who had come downstairs in her bonnet, slammed the dining-room door after her, walked across the hall, and let herself out. It did not take her many minutes to reach the telegraph office. From, there she sent a brief message to Helen Maybright: "_Sorry your father is ill. Expect me this evening with Daisy Rymple._" CHAPTER XIII. VERY ROUGH WEATHER. With all her easy and languishing ways, Flower Dalrymple had often gone through rough times. Her life in Australia had given to her experiences both of the extreme of luxury and the extreme of roughing, but never in the course of her young life did she go through a more uncomfortable journey than that from Mrs. Cameron's house in Bath to Sleepy Hollow. It was true that Scorpion, Mrs. Cameron, and Flower, traveled first-class; it was true also that where it was necessary for them to drive the best carriages to be procured were at their service; but, as on all and every occasion Scorpion was king of the ceremonies these arrangements did not add to Flower's comfort. Mrs. Cameron, who felt seriously angry with the young girl, addressed all her conversation to the dog, and as the dog elected to sit on Flower's lap, and snapped and snarled whenever she moved, and as Mrs. Cameron's words were mostly directed through the medium of Scorpion at her, her position was not an agreeable one. "Ah-ha, my dear doggie!" said the good lady. "Somebody has come to the wrong box, has she not? Somebody thought I would take her in, and be kind to her, and pet her, and give her your cream, did she not? But no one shall have my doggie's cream; no, that they shan't!" "Mrs. Cameron," said Flower, when these particularly clever and lucid remarks had continued for nearly an hour, "may I open the window of the carriage at this side? I'm quite stifling." Mrs. Cameron laid a firm, fat hand upon the window cord, and bent again over the pampered Scorpion. "And is my doggie's asthma not to be considered for the sake of somebody who ought not to be here, who was never invited nor wished for, and is now to be returned like a bad penny to where she came from? Is my own dearest little dog to suffer for such a person's whims? Oh, fie! oh, fie! Well, come here my Scorpion; your mistress won't reject you." For Flower, in a fit of ungovernable temper, had suddenly dashed the petted form of Scorpion to the ground. The poor angry girl now buried herself in the farthest corner of the railway carriage. From there she could hear Mrs. Cameron muttering about "somebody's" temper, and hoping that "somebody" would get her deserts. These remarks, uttered several times, frightened Flower so much that at last she looked up, and said, in a queer, startled voice: "You don't think Dr. Maybright is going to die? You can't be so awfully wicked as to think that."