"And he made the most of his holiday by spending a great portion of it in the sick-room of a fever-stricken patient! No, no, Dr. Wilmot; you made a great sacrifice undoubtedly. Now, why did you make it?"
He turned suddenly upon Wilmot as he spoke, and looked him straight in the face. Wilmot's colour came again; he moved restlessly in his chair, pressed his hands nervously together, but said nothing.
"I told you, Dr. Wilmot, that I was about to speak of things the mere mention of which, were we not men of honour, would be compromising to some of the persons spoken of. I ask you why you made that sacrifice of your professional time. I ask you not for information, because I know the reason. Before you left Kilsyth, I heard that my sister was receiving attention from a most undesirable quarter--from a quarter whence it was impossible that any good could arise. My sister is, as I have told you, dearer to me than my life, and the news distressed me beyond measure. I turned it over and over in my mind; I made every possible kind of inquiry. At length, on the evening on which you arrived in London and called on me at my club, I knew that you were the man alluded to by my informant."
No change in Chudleigh Wilmot. His cheek is still flushed, his eyes still cast down; still he moves restlessly in his chair, still his hands pluck nervously at each other.
"I knew it, and yet I hardly could believe it. I knew that men of your profession, specially men of such eminence in your profession, were in the habit of being received and treated with the utmost confidence; which confidence was never abused. I knew that bystanders and lookers-on, unaccustomed to illness, might very easily misconstrue the attention which a physician would pay to a young lady whose case had excited his strong professional interest. I--well, constrained to take the worst view of it--I knew that you were a married man, and I thought that you might have admired Miss Kilsyth, and that--that when you left her--there--there would be an end of the feeling."
No change in Chudleigh Wilmot. His cheek is still flushed, his eyes still cast down; still he moves restlessly in his chair, still his hands pluck nervously at each other. Something in his appearance seemed to touch Ronald Kilsyth as he looked at him earnestly, for he said:
"I wish to God I could think so now, Dr. Wilmot! I wish to God I could think so now! But though I don't pretend to be versed in these matters, I have a certain amount of insight; and when I saw you standing by my sister's side in the drawing-room in Brook-street yesterday, I knew that the information I had received was correct." He paused for an instant, and passed his hand across his forehead, then resumed. "I am a blunt man, Dr. Wilmot, but I trust neither coarse nor unsympathetic. I want to convey to you as quietly as possible that you have made a mistake; that for everyone's sake--ours, Madeleine's, your own--this thing cannot, must not be."
A change in Chudleigh Wilmot now. He does not look up; he covers his brow with his left hand; but he says in a deep husky voice:
"There is--as you are aware--a change in my circumstances: I am--I am free now; and perhaps--in the future--"
"In no future, Dr. Wilmot," interrupted Ronald gravely, but not unkindly. "Listen to me. If, as I half suspected you would, you had flung yourself into a rage,--denied, stormed, protested,--I should simply have said my say, and left you to make the best or the worst of it. But you have not done this, and--and I pity you most sincerely. You are, as you say, free now. You think probably there is no reason why, at some future time, you should not ask my sister to become your wife. You would probably urge your claims upon her gratitude--claims which you think she might possibly be brought to allow. It can never be, Dr. Wilmot. I, who am anything but, in this sense, a worldly man, even I know that your presence at Kilsyth, your long stay there, to the detriment of your home interests, your devotion to my sister, have already given matter for talk to the gossips of society, and received the usual amount of malicious comment. And if you have real regard for Madeleine, you would give up anything to shield her from that, indorsed as would be the imputation and intensified as would be the malice, if your relations with her were to be on any other footing than--they ought to have been."