Mr. West returned home early in the season, and inaugurated his arrival with new horses, new liveries, new footmen, and gave a series of most recherché dinners. He would have bidden Mr. Wynne to one of these banquets, for the old gentleman had a tenacious memory (especially for things that his daughter expressly wished he would forget), but she quietly turned the subject; and did not encourage the idea of entertaining her husband under her unsuspicious parent’s roof.
“But he belongs to my club, The Foolscap. I see him there now and then, and he seems a popular chap, and to know every one. I heard Fotherham—Lord Fotherham—pressing him to spend a couple of days with them up the river, and they say his articles and writings are quite popular.”
“Oh, I don’t think literary people are very interesting; you have always to get up all their works, and be able to stand a stiff examination in them, if you want to invite them here. Did you see the failure of a great bank in Australia—it was among the telegrams in the Echo this evening?” she added artfully.
“No. Bless my soul! what bank? Where is the paper?” in great excitement. And Mr. West’s mind was hurried away into another channel, and Mr. Wynne’s invitation-card was not despatched.
Madeline found time to pay many stealthy visits to Harry, who was really a beautiful child, of whom even the most indifferent mother might well feel proud. He could talk and walk so nicely, and was such a pretty, endearing little fellow, that her visits, from being spasmodic and irregular, became of weekly occurrence.
Impunity had emboldened her, and every Saturday morning, when her father imagined her to be shopping, or in the Park—found her in Mrs. Holt’s old-fashioned garden, walking and playing between high hollyhocks, sunflowers, and lavender bushes, with a fair-haired little boy. What would Mr. West have said had he seen his lovely daughter running round and round, and up and down the gravel path, driven by two knotted reins, and a small fierce driver, wielding a long whip with a whistle at the end of it?
Mr. and Mrs. Wynne never met, for her days, as we have seen, were Saturdays, and his were invariably Sundays.
Low fever was prevalent that sultry month of June, also typhoid and diphtheria. The latter fastened its grim clutch on little Harry. It was a case which developed rapidly. The child had been hot and heavy, and not his usual bright talkative self, when his mother saw him on Saturday. Mrs. Holt attributed this entirely to the oppressive weather, and to thunder in the air. On Sunday his father, justly alarmed, summoned the local doctor, who at once pronounced that the little patient was a victim to diphtheria.
On Monday Madeline was sent for. The child was a shade better, though still very ill. He lay in his cot and gazed at her with large distended eyes—and gasped out “Mummy—mummy,” as he held out his little hot hands.
She remained all day, for it so happened that her father was out of town; but, under any circumstances, she assured herself, she would have stayed all the same; and when she finally departed, late in the evening, the patient was sleeping, and the doctor’s opinion more encouraging. He assured her that she need not alarm herself, as he walked down with her to where the fly stood waiting in the lane.