“Silly girl!” he said, pettishly. “Ah, my brain is surely bursting! Send that footman away!”
“Footman, Harold? There is no one in the room except ourselves!” she cried, clinging to him tightly.
He laughed a hollow laugh, and reeled toward his bedroom, uttering wild words.
“Who is this,” he said, “that dares stand between me and freedom? Who has robbed me of my love of my life? Oh, cursed is my fate!”
A doctor was sent for, and Sir Harold was pronounced to be in a high state of fever. A sedative was administered, and the medical man would give no decided opinion as to the malignancy of the attack. For two days he raved of many things, appealing by turns to Lady Elaine and his young wife for protection against some mysterious and dreaded phantom, and Theresa drank in every word—drank them in one by one—poison drops that crowded her soul with a hopeless misery more bitter than death.
On the sixth day he was pronounced out of danger. The fever had in reality only been a passing attack, and his first rational words were a demand for his wife.
“Theresa,” he said, softly, “is it not annoying that I should become ill so soon after our wedding? But I shall soon be all right again, dear one, and we will leave England, perhaps forever. I hate it now!”
“And why do you hate England?” his wife asked, with a look in her eyes that made him feel uneasy. “Would you have hated your country if we had never met, Harold?”
“Have I been talking some nonsense in my delirium?” was his quick demand. “Oh, Theresa, you must forget every word of it! Kiss me, little wife! and let me see the happy smile of old upon your sweet face! Do you remember how happy we were in the little garden at Tenterden, with its wonderland of flowers and nooks, its singing birds and humming bees?”
“Don’t, don’t, my husband!” she sobbed. “Those blessed days are passed. They were but an illusive dream. If we were back again in the cottage, and things were just the same as then, without knowledge of the cruel world beyond, how sweet to die, with my head on your breast!”