He had worded it as carefully as he could, but he was only too well assured that his message would carry desolation to her heart, and his own yearned over her. He longed yet dreaded to see her, and when the train came rushing into the station about noon, and he stood on the platform to receive the slender, black-robed figure, with its eyes strained with anguish, and all life and joy banished from the face, it was with difficulty he restrained himself from catching her in his arms.
“I have come alone,” Polly said, in a hard, hoarse voice. “Mother is ill in bed. I did not tell her all. She thinks I have come to see you about arranging his business, poor boy! I had to invent something. It would have killed her to come as she is.” She lifted her eyes to Valentine’s face after this. “Harold is very, very ill. I know it—I feel it,” she said.
Valentine bowed his head.
“He is very ill,” he answered; “but there is hope.”
Polly buried her face in her hands, and the brougham jolted over the road.
“There is no hope,” she said, brokenly. “Oh! mother, darling, if only I could have stood between you and this last sorrow!”
CHAPTER XIII.
HOPING AGAINST HOPE.
Harold Pennington passed rapidly from one alarming stage of illness to another. He was in a high fever when Polly arrived to crouch down by his bedside, and when the doctor came to pay a third visit in the same day, his face alone conveyed to the girl how justly founded had been her despairing cry that there was no hope. Hope, indeed, there was none. The case proved most complicated. By nighttime the temperature had risen still higher, and symptoms of pneumonia had developed.
Grace never left the other girl, and Polly turned to her as though they had been friends all their lives. It was, indeed, in such moments as these that Grace demonstrated her full beauty and wealth of heart and sympathy. She had bitterly reproached herself at first with lack of thought for the boy.
“I ought not to have taken him out,” she said to Polly, her eyes full of tears. “I ought to have known that this cold weather would try him.”