“Rather changed?” said Doris, faintly.
“Well, yes, miss. He used to be rather wild, and certainly always in the best of humors, what would be described as light-hearted. I used to say that it made one laugh one’s self to hear his laugh, so free and blithesome it was, so to speak. But he’s got quieter of late, and we hear him laugh scarcely at all now. But perhaps you know his lordship, miss?”
A scarlet wave of color rose and passed over Doris’ face, and she shook her head silently.
“Ah, well, miss, you wouldn’t have known him for the same person. Perhaps it’s the responsibility of this engagement and the marquis’ illness.”
“He—is not here?—here at Pescia?” she asked, stopping short suddenly, with a look of alarm.
“Oh, no, miss; or of course he would have brought the marquis’ message instead of me. Oh, no; it was the marquis’ wish that he should come on the Continent quite alone, and Lord Cecil remained, very reluctantly, in England. Of course, I should take upon myself to send for him if the marquis got seriously worse. This is the house—villa, as they call it,” and he conducted Doris into the miniature palace which his agents had succeeded in renting for the marquis.
Doris waited in the—literally—marble hall, while the valet went upstairs to convey the result of his mission to his master, and she employed the few minutes before his return in composing herself.
She was going, in obedience to his whim, to sit beside the bed of this sick old man, who had robbed her of her lover and wrecked all her life, the Marquis of Stoyle, at whose request or command Lord Cecil had abandoned her!
“If any one had told me that I should have done this thing,” she mused, in sad wonderment, “with what scorn I should have repelled the suggestion; and yet—I am here. And, what is more wonderful still, I cannot hate him—could not, if I tried. Is it because he is so old, and ill, and helpless, and looks so unhappy? Only the wretched can feel for the wretched, they say,” and she sighed as she followed the man up the stairs into a carefully-shaded room.
The great marquis lay upon a couch wrapped in his velvet dressing-gown, the brightness of which seemed to heighten the effect of his pallid, wasted face, with its piercing eyes shining like brilliants in their hollow, dark-ringed sockets.