“I’m afraid she’s gone, your friend,” she said a few minutes later, to the shocked, benumbed woman who kept vigil in the corridor. “But believe me it’s better so. Though we haven’t managed to get hold of her husband yet.”
Here she hesitated. And, with an eye to stuff, cut and cost of the other’s clothing, asked a little diffidently: “Is your . . . are you by chance’Margaret’? Oh yes? So IT WAS you she was thinking of. She seemed to be trying to tell you something. It was all very jumbled and confused, I only got a word here and there. Something about a coat — the one she had on when she was brought in, I suppose — and a thief. Perhaps she was afraid it had been stolen. Though,” very apologetically, “it did seem once as if she was calling herself a thief. Still, they often talk nonsense at
