"Yes, John; I am grave, because I know you are ill, and that you are striving to hide it from me lest I should be alarmed. That is not the way it should be, John; you know we swore to be loyal to each other in sickness as well as in health, and it would be my pride as well as my duty to take up my place by you in sickness and be your nurse."
"I want no nurse, little woman," he said, bending tenderly over her. "As I told you this morning, I am quite well only a little--" And then his brain reeled, and his legs tottered beneath him, and had he not caught hold of the chair standing at his elbow, he would have fallen to the ground.
"You are ill, John; there is the proof," Alice cried, after he had seated himself and thrown himself heavily back in the chair. She knelt by his side, bathing his forehead with eau-de-cologne. "You are ill, and must be attended to at once. Now listen; do you understand me?"
A feeble pressure of her hand intimated assent.
"Well, then, Mr. Broadbent mentioned quite by accident this morning that a celebrated London physician, a Doctor Haughton I think he called him, was in the habit of coming up here every day just now to visit Mr. Piggott it the Rookery; and it struck me at the time that it would be a very good plan if we could send round to the Rookery and ask this Doctor Haughton to call in as he was passing and see you."
"No!" cried John Claxton in a loud voice, as he started up in his chair; "no, I forbid you distinctly to do anything of the kind. I will have no strange doctor admitted into this house. Understand, Alice, these are my orders, and I insist on their being obeyed."
"That is quite enough, John," said Alice; "you know that your will is my law; still I hope to make you think better of it for your own sake and for mine."
They said no more about it just then. Alice remained kneeling by her husband, holding his hand in hers, and softly smoothing his hair, and bathing his forehead, until the dinner was announced. The threat of calling in Doctor Haughton seemed to have had an inspiriting effect on the invalid. He ate and drank more than he had done on the three previous days, and talked more freely and with greater gaiety. So comparatively lively was he, that Alice began to hope that he had been merely suffering, as he had said, under an accumulation of business worries, and that with a little rest and quiet he would recover his ordinary health and spirits.
Quite late in the evening, as they were sitting together in the library, John began talking to his wife about Tom Durham. He had scarcely touched upon the subject since the news of the unfortunate man's death had arrived in England, and even now he introduced it cautiously and with becoming reverence.
"Of course it was a sad blow," he said, "and just now it seems very hard for you to bear; but don't think I have failed to notice, Alice, how, in your love and care for me, you have set aside your own grief lest the sight of your sorrow should distress me."