“Oh! if I could stay!”
“Most likely you would be turned out for fear of excitement. The stone will be safer for him.”
“Where did that come from?” asked Lenore, struck suddenly with wonder.
“I wrote to Miss Strangeways, when I saw how he was always feeling, feeling, feeling for it, like the Bride of Lammermoor. I told her there was more than she knew connected with that bit of stone, and life or death might hang on it. Then when I’d got it, I hardly knew what to do with it, for if it had soothed the poor boy delirious, the coming to his right mind might have been all the worse.”
Rosamond kissed her effusively, and she dreamily muttered, “He must be saved.” There was a sort of strange mist round her, as though she knew not what she was doing, and she longed to be alone. She would not let Rosamond drive her beyond the Sirenwood gate, but insisted on walking through the park alone in the darkness, by that very path where Frank had ten months ago exchanged vows with her.
Rosamond turned back to the Hall. It was poor Cecil’s pony-carriage that she was driving, and she took it to the stable-yard, where her entreaty had obtained it from the coachman, whom she rewarded by saying, “I was right, Brown, I fetched his best doctor,” and the old servant understood, and came as near a smile as any one at Compton could do on such a day.
“Is the carriage gone for Mr. Charnock?”
“Yes, my lady, I sent Alfred with it; I did not seem as if I could go driving into Wil’sbro’ on such a day.”
Rosamond bade a kind farewell to the poor old coachman, and was walking homewards, when she saw a figure advancing towards her, strangely familiar, and yet hat and coat forbade her to believe it her husband, even in the dusk. She could not help exclaiming, “Miles!”
“Yes!” he said, coming to a standstill. “Are you Rosamond?”