"You will stay? I will try to sleep now if you will touch me. Katrine, you will not slip away?"
"I shall stay until you are quite well, beloved."
At three in the morning he awoke with a shiver. "Where are you?" he called. "Where are you, Katrine?"
"Here," she answered, laying a hand on his cheek.
"Ah, thank God!"
It was over a month before Mrs. Ravenel and Katrine were able to take Frank south, where he longed to be. The St. Petersburg engagement was cancelled, and the Metropolitan manager, angry at Katrine's forgetfulness to notify him that she could not sing the night Mrs. Ravenel
had come for her, made many caustic newspaper criticisms. But both events seemed entirely unimportant to her, for Frank's paralysis, which the doctors had believed but a temporary affair, did not leave him as soon as had been hoped.
There was a splendid Celtic recklessness in the way she surrendered everything for him, a generosity which Mrs. Ravenel saw with commending eyes, believing it, by some strange mother-reasoning, to be but just. But Frank was far from taking the same attitude in the matter. Almost the first day he was able to be wheeled on the great piazza in the sunshine he spoke to Katrine of the time she must soon leave, to keep the St. Petersburg engagements.
"I have no St. Petersburg engagements," she explained, briefly. "I cancelled them."