For two days Rosanne lay there, silent and strange. The third day her sickness took an acute form. She tossed and moaned and called out in her pain, her face twisted with torture. Her mind appeared to remain clear.
"Mother, I believe I am dying," she said, after one such spell, during the afternoon. "I feel as if something is tearing itself loose from my very being. Does it hurt like this when the soul is trying to escape from the body?"
"I have sent for the doctor again, darling."
"It is nothing he can cure. It is here, and here that I suffer." She touched her head and her heart. "But, oh, my body, too, is tortured!"
She lay still a little while, moaning softly to herself while her mother stood by, sick with distress; then she said:
"Send for Denis Harlenden, mother. I must see him before I die."
Mrs. Ozanne asked no question. Her woman's instinct told her much that Rosanne had left unsaid. Within half an hour, Harlenden was being shown into the drawing-room, where she awaited him. He came in with no sign upon his face of the anxiety in his heart. This was the fourth day since he had seen Rosanne, and she had sent him no word.
"Sir Denis, my daughter is very ill. I don't know why she should be calling out for you——" She faltered. Marks of the last few days' anxiety were writ large upon her, but she was not wanting in a certain patient dignity.
Harlenden strode over and took her hands in his as he would have taken the hands of his own mother.
"It is because we love each other," he said gently, "and because, as soon as she will let me, I am going to marry her."