'Thank you,' she said. 'I'll go home by train.'
He had visits to make, and was glad to be quit of her, but with elaborate cold care came to the station, found that a train was nearly due, and waited with her. He must have done so for the purpose of saying, 'Mind! these are estimable persons, but that is no reason for dropping self-restraint.' Then, as her pout nettled him, 'Nothing is more disgusting or unmaidenly than pursuit of one in a lower walk of life.'
'Walks of life are what men make them.' And they treated each other with dignified silence till the train came.
'Well,' said Dr. May, on hearing his son's story, 'the Press is king now-a-days, and one daughter is his tribute.' The Doctor still liked to tease Tom.
Meantime, Lance, in no condition to resist, had betaken himself to his own chamber, but only to find the housemaid had left the bed in the most approved sanitary state—so long as it was not to be lain on. Not sorry for a dispensation from captivity, he extracted his private horse-hair pillow from the pile of bed-clothes, and came back to the painting-room, where Cherry cleared her large sofa, and covered him up with her Indian silk quilt, he smiling blissfully, and observing, 'Isn't she the dearest girl in the world?' Cherry might have heard a great deal, had it been possible to her to sit and talk when innumerable messages were coming for her. When she had answered the first, he began again with 'So sweet and generous.' Then came the second which involved a note. When she looked at him again, he only smiled. She next had to go down to the kitchen; and on her cautious return she found him asleep, breathing like a child, and a colour—not fever—coming into his cheek.
'Poor fellow!' she sighed to herself. 'I wonder if there is any hope for him; but if the notion only bears him through to-day, it is a blessing!'
Poor Cherry! Such as this was all the nursing she was good for. Her nerves made her not to be trusted alone in a sick-room, not to do equal damage to herself and the patient; and she could only sit with the door ajar, writing notes, and acting as referee to countless questions, all in an undertone out of respect to Lance's slumbers.
And there meanwhile sat Angela, trusted to fan Felix, refresh him with a strawberry or spoonful of iced lemonade, bathe his face with eau-de-cologne, or catch his slightest wish, cares so congenial, that she liked them for a stranger, how much more delightful for 'my brother;' and though she knew more clearly than anyone save John and Clement how precarious his state was, youthful buoyancy viewed the danger as the cause of future triumph. To be a lady-doctor was surely her vocation! What a pity Charlie was heir to a baronetcy! And he had finally saved her—though she had kept herself afloat—he might be allowed the honour of her rescue; and if it made him her fate, Lady Audley, M.D., should obtain a magnificent triumph over conventionality, far beyond all her former conceptions.
When Clement came into the room at noon, she would not give up her place. Felix looked up to him, and said, 'You are seeing to things!'
'Yes—' interrogatively.