Page:Sorrell and Son - Deeping - 1926.djvu/152

 No, my wife—Ethel.—What? You will come! O,—that's great. At once. They're afraid"

With all these comings and goings, of alarms and anguishes, the inevitable truth filtered out. No one thought of concealing it, and two hours after the accident had happened Sorrell was caught by a local reporter.

"I say—it is a fact?"

"What?"

"The injured lady is Ethel Frobisher?"

"It is a fact. They were here on their honeymoon."

"Great Scott! If I'd known. Here's a scoop!"

The reporter dashed out to examine the site of the accident, and to interview the lorry driver who was still moping at the side of the road, and Sorrell thought no more of him for the moment. His self and its affairs were obscured by his human involvement in the morning's tragedy. He had seen the little lady carried in and up the stairs by a man with a face whose whiteness was streaked with red.

Sir Magnus Ord came down by car. It seemed that the case was as serious as it could be, and Ord wished to move the little lady to the quietest room in the hotel, away from the road and overlooking the garden. It was arranged. People moved out to give place to her. Two nurses arrived from Winstonbury. A little crowd of interested humans began to move out from Winstonbury, to gather round the wrecked car and to stare at the Pelican windows. Hulks came to tell Sorrell that he had found three men taking photographs in the garden, and what was he to do about it?

By eight o'clock, when the Winstonbury shops had closed, a considerable crow stippled the white road and the broad grass verges. Sorrell found his son sitting on one of the black chains, a little figure by itself, youthfully interested.

"Is she going to die, pater?"

"How did you hear about it, Kit?"

"Oh, everybody's talking about it. I saw her in The Great Love—you know. Only two weeks ago, pater. Fanny Garland took me."

"I suppose it depends on the doctors."

"I think—it must be rather fine to be a doctor," said the boy, reflectively.

The Winstonbury Evening Argus began the great game of "headlines."