HOUR after hour Loyd knelt beside the bed where Florence lay, motionless and unconscious. Her aunt and sister glided noiselessly about, passed in and out of the room, rarely speaking, and then but in a whisper. At last a servant whispered in Loyd’s ear a message. He started and said, “Yes, let him wait;” and then, in a moment after, added, “No, say no. I’ll not want the boat—the luggage may be taken back to my room.”
It was a few minutes after this that Emily came behind him, and, bending down so as to speak in his ear, said, “How I thank you, my dear brother, for this! I know the price of your devotion—none of us will ever forget it.”
He made no answer, but pressed the cold damp hand he held to his lips.
“Does he know that it is nigh seven o’clock, Milly, and that he must be at Como a quarter before eight, or he’ll lose the train?” said Miss Grainger to her niece.
“He knows it all, aunt; he has sent away the boat; he will not desert us.”
“Remember, child, what it is he is sacrificing. It may chance to be his whole future fortune.”
“He’ll stay, let it cost what it may,” said Emily.
“I declare I think I will speak to him. It is my duty to speak to him,” said the old lady, in her own fussy, officious tone. “I will not expose myself to the reproaches of his family—very just reproaches, too, if they imagined we had detained him. He will lose, not only his passage out to India, but, not impossibly, his appointment too.
“Joseph, Joseph, I have a word to say to you.”
“Dearest aunt, I implore you not to say it,” cried Emily.