“Mrs. Mowbray, I don’t know what can have deceived you to this point. It is absolute folly: all that Mr. Anderson lent to people at St. Rule’s was never above a few hundred pounds. I know of nothing more. There is nothing more. There was one of three hundred--nothing more. Be composed, be composed and listen to me. Mrs. Mowbray!”
But she neither listened nor heard him, her excitement had reached to a point beyond which flesh and blood overmastered by wild anxiety and disappointment could not go.
“It can’t be true,” she shrieked out. “It can’t be true, it mustn’t be true.” And then, with a shriek that rang through the house, throwing out her arms, she fell like a mass of ruins on the floor.
Mrs. Buchanan was busy with her napery at some distance from the study. She had heard the visitor come in, and had concluded within herself that her poor husband would have an ill time of it with that woman. “But there’s something more on her mind than that pickle siller,” the minister’s wife had said to herself, shaking her head over the darns in her napery. She had long been a student of the troubled faces that came to the minister for advice or consolation, and, having only that evidence to go upon, had formed many a conclusion that turned out true enough, sometimes more true than those which, with a more extended knowledge, from the very lips of the penitents, had been formed by the minister himself: for the face, as Mrs. Buchanan held, could not make excuses, or explain things away, but just showed what was. She was pondering over this case, half-sorry and, perhaps, half-amused that her husband should have this tangled skein to wind, which he never should have meddled with, so that it was partly his own fault--when the sound of those shrieks made her start. They were far too loud and too terrible to ignore. Mrs. Buchanan threw down the linen she was darning, seized a bottle of water from the table, and flew to her husband’s room. Already there were two maids on the stairs hurrying towards the scene of the commotion, to one of whom she gave a quick order, sending the other away.
“Thank God that you’ve come,” said Mr. Buchanan, who was feebly endeavouring to drag the unfortunate woman to her feet again.