"So ill, ma'am, that I begged and prayed her to let me send for a doctor.You know what my mistress is.If you would please to use your influence--""I will order the carriage instantly, and take you back with me."Before she dressed to go out, Stella showed the letter to her husband.He spoke with perfect kindness and sympathy, but he did not conceal that he shared his wife's apprehensions."Go at once," were his last words to her; "and, if I can be of any use, send for me."It was late in the evening before Stella returned.She brought sad news.
The physician consulted told her plainly that the neglected cough, and the constant fatigue, had together made the case a serious one.He declined to say that there was any absolute danger as yet, or any necessity for her remaining with her mother at night.The experience of the next twenty-four hours, at most, would enable him to speak positively.In the meantime, the patient insisted that Stella should return to her husband.Even under the influence of opiates, Mrs.Eyrecourt was still drowsily equal to herself."You are a fidget, my dear, and Matilda is a fidget--I can't have two of you at my bedside.Good-night."Stella stooped over her and kissed her.She whispered: "Three weeks notice, remember, for the party!"By the next evening the malady had assumed so formidable an aspect that the doctor had his doubts of the patient's chance of recovery.With her husband's full approval, Stella remained night and day at her mother's bedside.
Thus, in a little more than a month from the day of his marriage, Romayne was, for the time, a lonely man again.
The illness of Mrs.Eyrecourt was unexpectedly prolonged.There were intervals during which her vigorous constitution rallied and resisted the progress of the disease.On these occasions, Stella was able to return to her husband for a few hours--subject always to a message which recalled her to her mother when the chances of life or death appeared to be equally balanced.Romayne's one resource was in his books and his pen.For the first time since his union with Stella he opened the portfolios in which Penrose had collected the first introductory chapters of his historical work.Almost at every page the familiar handwriting of his secretary and friend met his view.It was a new trial to his resolution to be working alone; never had he felt the absence of Penrose as he felt it now.He missed the familiar face, the quiet pleasant voice, and, more than both, the ever-welcome sympathy with his work.Stella had done all that a wife could do to fill the vacant place; and her husband's fondness had accepted the effort as adding another charm to the lovely creature who had opened a new life to him.But where is the woman who can intimately associate herself with the hard brain-work of a man devoted to an absorbing intellectual pursuit? She can love him, admire him, serve him, believe in him beyond all other men--but (in spite of exceptions which only prove the rule) she is out of her place when she enters the study while the pen is in his hand.
More than once, when he was at work, Romayne closed the page bitterly; the sad thought came to him, "Oh, if I only had Penrose here!" Even other friends were not available as a resource in the solitary evening hours.Lord Loring was absorbed in social and political engagements.And Major Hynd--true to the principle of getting away as often as possible from his disagreeable wife and his ugly children--had once more left London.
One day, while Mrs.Eyrecourt still lay between life and death, Romayne found his historical labors suspended by the want of a certain volume which it was absolutely necessary to consult.He had mislaid the references written for him by Penrose, and he was at a loss to remember whether the book was in the British Museum, in the Bodleian Library, or in the Bibliotheque at Paris.In this emergency a letter to his former secretary would furnish him with the information that he required.But he was ignorant of Penrose's present address.The Lorings might possibly know it--so to the Lorings he resolved to apply.
