'If you please, Miss Margaret, he says he's to ask particular how
you are. I think he must mean missus; but he says his last words
were, to ask how Miss Hale was.' 'Me!' said Margaret, drawing herself up. 'I am quite well. Tell
him I am perfectly well.' But her complexion was as deadly white
as her handkerchief; and her head ached intensely.
Mr. Hale now came in. He had left his sleeping wife; and wanted,
as Margaret saw, to be amused and interested by something that
she was to tell him. With sweet patience did she bear her pain,
without a word of complaint; and rummaged up numberless small
subjects for conversation--all except the riot, and that she
never named once. It turned her sick to think of it.
'Good-night, Margaret. I have every chance of a good night
myself, and you are looking very pale with your watching. I shall
call Dixon if your mother needs anything. Do you go to bed and
sleep like a top; for I'm sure you need it, poor child!' 'Good-night, papa.' She let her colour go--the forced smile fade away--the eyes grow
dull with heavy pain. She released her strong will from its
laborious task. Till morning she might feel ill and weary.
She lay down and never stirred. To move hand or foot, or even so
much as one finger, would have been an exertion beyond the powers
of either volition or motion. She was so tired, so stunned, that
she thought she never slept at all; her feverish thoughts passed
and repassed the boundary between sleeping and waking, and kept
their own miserable identity. She could not be alone, prostrate,
powerless as she was,--a cloud of faces looked up at her, giving
her no idea of fierce vivid anger, or of personal danger, but a
deep sense of shame that she should thus be the object of
universal regard--a sense of shame so acute that it seemed as if
she would fain have burrowed into the earth to hide herself, and
yet she could not escape out of that unwinking glare of many
eyes.