A bankrupt heart, Vol. 2 (of 3)

A BANKRUPT HEART.
FLORENCE MARRYAT,
AUTHOR OF ‘LOVE’S CONFLICT,’ ‘MY OWN CHILD,’ ‘PARSON JONES,’ ETC., ETC.
IN THREE VOLUMES.
VOL. II.
LONDON: F. V. WHITE & CO., 14 BEDFORD STREET, STRAND, W.C.
1894.
This story being already dramatised, all rights are reserved.
A BANKRUPT HEART.
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For seven weeks Nell Llewellyn fluctuated between life and death before she was fully roused again to a sense of living and its cares and responsibilities. It was on a sunny afternoon, in the middle of October, that she first awoke to the consciousness that she was herself. But she was too weak to do more than be aware of it. The afternoon sun was glinting through the white blind of her bedroom window, and a little breeze caused it to flap gently against the latticed panes. Nell lay on her bed, as weak and unreasoning and incurious as a little child, and watched the tassel of the blind bobbing up and down, without questioning why she lay there, unable to move or think. An old woman named Betsy Hobbs, who came in sometimes to help in an emergency at the farmhouse, was seated by the window, with a large pair of knitting-needles in her hands, a ball of worsted at her feet, and her head sunk on her breast, enjoying a snooze after the labours of the day. Nell stared at her unfamiliar figure with the same sense of incapacity to understand her presence, and the same sense of utter indifference to not understanding it. Her feeble sight roved over everything in the room with the same apathy. The coverlet on her bed was a coloured one, and she kept on counting the squares and wondering in a vague manner why one should be red and the next blue. One red, and the next blue—one red, and the next blue—she kept on mentally repeating to herself, until her eyes had travelled to the foot of the bed, over the footboard of which was thrown a pink knitted shawl, or kerchief, which her mother had bought for her just before she was taken ill, and which she had worn around her shoulders on the evening she had gone to hear Hugh Owen preach in the field. That little link between the past and the present recalled it all. In a moment she comprehended. She was no longer happy, innocent Nell Llewellyn, spending her young life at Panty-cuckoo Farm, but the disgraced and degraded daughter of the house, who had crept home, a living lie, to hide her shame and sorrow in her mother’s bosom. The remembrance brought with it but one desire—one want—which expressed itself in a feeble cry of ‘Mother!’ At least, it was what Nell intended for a cry; but her voice was so faint and weak, that Betsy Hobbs only roused from her nap with a feeling of curiosity if she had heard anything. She was accustomed to nursing the sick, however, and was a light sleeper, so she hobbled up to the bedside and peered into her patient’s face. Sure enough her eyes were open and there was reason in them.