"It was the heat—the excitement—the overwork!" his sympathising guests declared, as their host was carried from their midst in a dead faint, with his face like the face of a corpse. But I knew better, and I laughed as I strode into my room at the hotel, and flung myself into an easy chair. Something on the mantelpiece attracted my attention, and I sprang up with a quick cry, and caught hold of a thin foreign envelope. I tore it open with trembling fingers, and read:—"My dear son. Come to me at Palermo, if you will.—Yours affectionately, H. D——"
It had come at last, then! Thank God! Thank God!
CHAPTER XXXI
MY FATHER AND I
"My father! my father!"
We stood on the slope of a wild heath-covered hill, alone, with no human being or sign of habitation in sight. Before us towered a dreary, lofty range of bare mountains—on one side was a fearful precipice, and below us on the other the blue sea. We had met on the road, my father and I!
With both hands clasping his, I looked into his face. Alas, how changed it was! Thin and shrunken, with hollow eyes and furrowed brow, he looked to me what he was, a wreck.
"You have been ill," I cried, with a lump in my throat and the tears springing into my eyes; "where have you been? Why did you not send for me?"
He pointed to a loose piece of rock a few yards off.
"Let us sit down, and I will tell you everything," he said, wearily; "I am tired."