And Judy answering that she felt a bit tired and ill, he abruptly left her — but only to linger outside her door heart-broken, hollow-eyed, and afraid. Later, when the doctor came, he comforted Kit and smiled at his anxious questions. His mother was sure to be all right in the morning. But Kit, with the keen prescience of intense affection, realised that she was as she had never been before. When night came, he stole quietly in to her and put his cheek against hers, but he could not trust himself to speak. Then he crept back to his own room, where he threw himself upon the bed, fully dressed, to wait for the morning. Before many hours had passed, however, a cry of pain aroused him:
"Kit! Kit!" He was at her side in a bound. "The doctor, Kit! I cannot breathe."
In looking back at it afterwards he never could remember how he found his cap or how he got out of doors. His first distinct consciousness was when he found himself on the road in front of the house mounted on his bicycle and starting on what seemed to him a race against time for Judy's life. What words can describe the tension of his feelings? All the accumulated suffering of that awful fear was at work within him. How he flew! What time he made from the start! Old Doctor Morton lived four miles down the river — but before he could strike the river road he must go a mile in the opposite direction, and then half as far again to the right. That mile and a half seemed a mile and a half of treason to Judy. But on, on, on — even while he was deploring it, he had accomplished it. And now he had turned into the smooth highway, running along by the river bank, and following Annie's pasture for a quarter of a mile. Little thought of Annie, however, was in his mind to-night — little thought of anything but Judy and speed. The road, the trees, the moon,
