Her lips were trembling. His sight grew dim as he answered:
"No, my dear. You are very ill; but you are not going to die. You are going to get well--not immediately, but before long. You must be patient, you know; and you must do everything you are desired to do."
"I will when I am sensible," she said; "but I am not always sensible, you know."
"I know. You are quite sensible now, and the best patient I ever had. A great deal depends on yourself. I don't mean about not dying; I mean about getting well sooner. Will you try now how long, being quite sensible, you can keep quiet?"
"I will," she answered, looking at him with the strange solemn gaze we see so often in the eyes of a child in mortal sickness. "I am so glad, Dr. Wilmot, you are sure I am not going to die."
Not a shade of doubt of him; perfect trust in him, entire calm and serenity in the unruffled feeble voice. Her hand lay loosely in his, undisturbed except by an occasional feverish twitch; her head was supported by his arm, which held the pillows; his serious eyes scanned her face. So he knelt and so she lay as the dawn came; so he knelt and so she lay as the first rays of the sun came glancing in through the closed window-curtains; but they found the patient sleeping, and the steady watch of the physician umrelaxed.
So time passed, and Madeleine's illness took its course, and was met and fought and beaten at every turn by the skill and judgment, the coolness and the experience of the "rising man." So unwearied a watcher had never been seen in a sick-room; so cheerful a counsellor and consoler had rarely been sent to friends and relatives in anxiety and suspense. He was appreciated at his worth at Kilsyth. As for Kilsyth himself, he reverenced, he esteemed, he next to worshipped Wilmot, holding him as almost superhuman. The nurse "had never seen such a doctor as him in all her born days, never; and not severe neither; but knowing as the best and wakefullest must have their little bit of rest at times." He won golden opinions from all within the old walls of Kilsyth, and more than all from its mistress.
On the whole, and despite his close and devoted attendance on his patient, Chudleigh Wilmot saw a great deal of Lady Muriel, and an infinite number of topics were discussed between them. Each day brought more extended, more appreciative comprehension of her guest to the by no means dull intellect of Lady Muriel; and each day quickened her womanly perception and kindled her already keen and ready jealousy. When many days had gone by, and Lady Muriel would no longer have dreamed of denying to herself how much she admired Wilmot,--how utterly different he was from any other man whom she had ever known; how much more interesting, how much more engrossing, a man to be looked up to and respected; a man to suffice to all a woman's need of reverence and deference,--she would still have been far from acknowledging that she loved him; but her acknowledgment or her denial would have made no difference in the fact. She did love him, in a lofty and reserved kind of way, in which no slur upon her honour, according to the world's code, which takes cognisance only of the letter of the law and ignores its spirit, was implied; but with all her heart she loved him.
So now the situation was this. Chudleigh Wilmot loved one woman within the walls of the old mansion of Kilsyth; and another woman, their inmate, loved him. Would she--the other, the older, the more experienced woman--discover his secret, and overwhelm him with its disgrace? Time alone could tell that--time, of which there was not much to run; for Wilmot had been a fortnight at Kilsyth before he could give its master the joyful intelligence that the fever had relaxed its grip of his child, and--barring the always present danger in scarlet-fever of relapse, or what is technically called "dregs"--Madeleine was safe.
Mabel Wilmot had written to her husband occasionally during the fortnight which had witnessed the rise and the crisis of Miss Kilsyth's illness. In her letters, which were few and sparing of details, she never alluded to the cause of her husband's unprecedented absence; Wilmot did not notice the omission. She gave him few details concerning herself; Wilmot did not observe their paucity. The glamour was over him; the enchanted land held him.