She tried to read it, but failed. The girl beside her saw her slip back, fainting, on her pillows. CHAPTER XV It was the old housekeeper at Coryston, one Mrs. Drew, who had been the presiding spirit of the house in all its domestic aspects for some thirty years, who came at the summons of Marcia's frightened maid, and helped the girl to revive her mistress, without alarming Lady Coryston. 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. And now, she supposed, as Marcia had actually been so foolish, so headstrong, as to go herself--without permission either from her mother or her betrothed--to see these two people at the farm, the very day before this horrible thing happened, she might have to appear at the inquest. Most improper and annoying! However, she scarcely expressed her disapproval aloud with her usual trenchancy. In the first place, Marcia's tremulous state made it difficult. In the next, she was herself so far from normal that she could not, after the first few minutes, keep her attention fixed upon the matter at all. She began abruptly to question Marcia as to whether she had seen Arthur the night before--or that morning? "I had gone up-stairs before he arrived last night--and this morning he's not yet down," said the girl, perfunctorily, as though she only answered the question with her lips, without attaching any real meaning to it. Then her mother's aspect, which on her entrance she had scarcely noticed, struck her with a sudden and added distress. "You don't look well, mother. Don't come down to-day."