The sick girl grew restless. She plucked at the green silk coverlet, evidently attempting to throw it off. "Take it away! the green is full of arsenic!" she whispered, with all the hurried vehemence of increasing fever.
Kitty instantly exchanged the silken coverlet for the cool, white linen counterpane, which she laid smoothly over the emaciated body of the poor girl whom the mob in the wood had called "dwarf." In the glorious eyes there was now not a ray of consciousness: they rolled wildly hither and thither beneath the half-closed eyelids.
"That does me good," she said, stretching herself wearily. "And now do not let them come in again to smother me with that hot, poisonous silk. Grandmamma is false, as is all the society she gathers about her,—she and the old poisoner, the great authority. I will strike him if he ever dares to lay his hateful fingers on my breast!" she muttered, angrily, through her shut teeth. Suddenly she sat up in bed and seized Kitty's hand. "Mistrust him, Bruck!" she said, holding up her forefinger; "and grandmamma too! And she,—you know who I mean,—the one who smokes cigars, and drives the new horses furiously because you forbade it,—she is the falsest of all!"
"Oh, thank you!" Flora said, in an under-tone, with a malicious smile, as she nestled in among the cushions of her chair.
Kitty was indescribably distressed as her hand was thus firmly held. She never glanced towards the doctor, for whom the delirious girl mistook her, and who stood at the head of the bed, half hidden by the Chinese screen.
"Do you remember how it all used to be?" Henriette continued. "Do you remember how the footmen used to be sent after you through wind and storm with letters, four, five a day? Do you remember how she used to rush to meet you, half wild with longing, if you did not come at the appointed moment? And how she would throw her arms around you as if nothing should ever loosen their clasp?"
At this Flora started up, her silken robes rustling, and her face as crimson as if the lately-vanished western glow had left its stain on her white cheeks. "Give her morphia!" she cried. "This is madness, rather than the delirium of fever; she must sleep."
The doctor had just before given the sick girl a teaspoonful of medicine; he did not notice Flora's words, save by the slight, fleeting smile with which one receives some ignorant and foolish suggestion, never even changing his attitude; the flush called to his cheek by Henriette's last words instantly faded, leaving him as coldly calm and impassive as before.
Flora sank back angrily in her chair, then turned away her head and looked restlessly abroad over the darkening fields.
"Did you ever believe that all could be so changed, Bruck? That she could declare it had all been a mistake?" Henriette began again, clasping both her burning hands around Kitty's right. The young girl's heart seemed to stop beating; on those fever-stricken lips were hovering the words to which no one, not even Flora herself, had yet dared to give utterance. Hastily she leaned over her sick sister and instinctively laid her left hand upon her forehead, as if she could thus divert her thoughts into another channel.