"To mine also, mother."
"Then be thankful—and patient. I'm going upstairs to get a letter I want posted. Will you take it to the mail for me?"
Then Mrs. Hatton left the room and John looked wistfully after her. "It is always so," he thought. "If I name children, she goes. What does it mean?"
He looked inquiringly into his mother's face when she returned and she smiled cheerfully back, but it was with the face of an angry woman she watched him to the gate, muttering words she would not have spoken had there been anyone to hear them nearby. And John's attitude was one of uncertain trouble. He carried himself intentionally with a lofty bearing, but in spite of all his efforts to appear beyond care, he was evidently in the grip of some unknown sorrow.
That it was unknown was in a large degree the core of his anxiety. He had noticed for a long time that his mother was apparently very unsympathetic when his wife was suffering from violent attacks of sickness which made her physician tread softly and look grave, and that even Jane's mother, though she nursed her daughter carefully, was reticent and exceedingly nervous. What could it mean?
He had just passed through an experience of this kind, and as he thought of Jane and her suffering the hurry of anxious love made him quicken his steps and he went rapidly home, so rapidly that he forgot the letter with which he had been intrusted. He knew by the light in Jane's room that she was awake and he hastened there. She was evidently watching and listening for his coming, for as soon as the door was partly open, she half-rose from the couch on which she was lying and stretched out her arms to him.
In an instant he was kneeling at her side. "My darling," he whispered. "My darling! Are you better?"
"I am quite out of pain, John, only a little weak. In a few days I shall be all right." But John, looking into the white face that had once been so radiant, only faintly admitted the promise of a few days putting all right.
"I have been lonely today dear, so lonely! My mother did not come, and Mother Hatton has not even sent to ask whether I was alive or dead."
"Yet she is very unhappy about your condition. Jane, my darling Jane! What is it that induces these attacks? Does your medical man know?"