It sank upon the coverlet with a little dull thud, scarce audible, save to him whose ears were strained to hear, whose senses were so preternaturally on the alert. Why had her head been so hard, or else those flags so soft! A less thing had killed a score of fools before this.
Something in her face again arrested him. Surely there was a change. He placed his ear close to her mouth and listened. When he uplifted himself presently his face had taken a grayish tinge. Her breath was certainly stronger and steadier.
He went back to the arm-chair and seated himself slowly in it.
He rose, as though he found it impossible to be still, and laid his hand upon the mantelpiece. His grasp was so hard that his knuckles stood out white against the black marble. That devil, Dillwyn, had said she might recover. No doubt his hope was father to his opinion. He would do him, Darkham, a bad turn wherever he could. There had been occasions lately in the neighbourhood when this young fool thought—strove—to wrestle with him in professional matters. There was that affair of General Montgomery's the day before last when Dillwyn had been called in to the Cedars. The general was an important person in the place, and though scarcely en rapport with Darkham, had generally employed him up to this. He thought of Dillwyn, of Agatha's face as he had seen it at Miss Firs-Robinson's dance—looking into Dillwyn's—of the preference shown to the latter by General Montgomery and a few other unimportant people, but people who always mean the thin end of the wedge in such affairs, and his clasp upon the arms of the chair grew tighter.
He broke off and glanced again at the bed, this time hurriedly, shortly. He saw her there, motionless, torpid, her sullen breaths coming with strange trouble from her breast. When would they cease! That was the one thought. When they ceased he would be free.
Presently he crept towards her again, and again bent over her and listened. He had not been mistaken, then! Yes, the breath was stronger; he even imagined now that her hand stirred a little. He stood up. A minute passed in which he hardly breathed.
In that minute he knew what he was going to do.
CHAPTER XII
He went back to his chair again, however, and fought it out with himself. Pah! what was it, after all, but to bring to a quicker end a life that the doctors had all but declared gone? What was it they had said? So deep was the intensity of his desire to go back to that consultation of the two doctors and their verdict that he hardly heard a faint movement in the room, a slow stirring of the curtains that half hid the bed.
At last he remembered. If she were to live for a certain number of hours there might be hope—a vague hope truly, said Dr. Bland, and not to be depended on, but a hope. If not, she must die. She had lived for many hours now, almost to the time mentioned, and still she breathed.