Next, a low, nervous fever supervened, and for six weeks Marguerite De Lancie swayed with a slow, pendulous uncertainty between life and death. The cause of her sudden indisposition remained a mystery. The few cautious inquiries made by Colonel Compton resulted in nothing satisfactory. The two gentlemen whose conversation was supposed by Miss Compton to have occasioned Miss De Lancie’s swoon could not be identified—among the crowd then assembled at the governor’s reception, and now dispersed all over the city—without urging investigation to an indiscreet extent.
“This is an inquiry that we cannot with propriety push, Nellie. We must await the issue of Miss De Lancie’s illness. If she recovers she will doubtless explain,” said Colonel Compton.
With the opening of the spring, Marguerite De Lancie’s life-powers rallied and convalescence declared itself. In the first stages of her recovery, while yet body and mind were in that feeble state which sometimes leaves the spiritual vision so clear, she lay one day, contemplating her friend, who sat by her pillow, when suddenly she threw her arms around Cornelia’s neck, lifted her eyes in an agony of supplication to her face, and cried:
“Oh, Nellie! do you truly love me? Oh, Nellie! love me! love me! lest I go mad!”
In reply, Cornelia half smothered the invalid with caresses and kisses, and assurances of unchanging affection.
“Oh, Nellie, Nellie! there was one who on the eve of the bitterest trial, said to his chosen friends, ‘All ye shall be offended because of me.’ And his chief friend said, ‘Although all should be offended yet will not I,’ and furthermore declared, ‘if I should die with thee, I will not deny thee in any wise.’ Oh! failing human strength! Oh! feeble human love! Nellie! you know how it ended. ‘They all forsook him and fled.’”
“But I will be truer to my friend than Peter to his master,” replied Cornelia.
Marguerite drew the girl’s face down closer to her own, gazed wistfully, not into but upon those brilliant, superficial brown eyes, that because they had no depth repelled her confidence, and then with a deep groan and a mournful shake of the head, she released Nellie, and turned her own face to the wall. Did she deem Miss Compton’s friendship less profound than pretentious? I do not know; but from that time Miss De Lancie maintained, upon one subject at least, a stern reserve. And when, at last, directly, though most kindly and respectfully, questioned as to the origin of her agitation and swoon in the ball-room, she declared it to have been a symptom of approaching illness, and discouraged further interrogation.
Slowly Marguerite De Lancie regained her strength. It was the middle of March before she left her bed, and the first of April before she went out of the house.
One day about this time, as the two friends were sitting together in Marguerite’s chamber, Cornelia said: