He apologized for having left them for so many hours, and explained the business that had called him so suddenly away, giving them the startling intelligence of Miss Tabby's unaccountable safety; which, he added, left the fate of his beloved wife in greater uncertainty than they had supposed it to be. She was probably drowned, but possibly rescued. He could not tell. He and they must wait patiently the issue of events.
Wait patiently? Twice more that day he walked up to the overseer's cottage to find out whether Miss Tabby's fever had gone off and she had come to her senses, and he came back disappointed. And again, very late at night, he walked up there and startled the watcher by the sick-bed with the same question so often repeated:
"Has she come to her senses yet?"
"No; she is more stupider than ever, I think," was Miss Libby's answer.
"What does your mother think is the matter with her, then?"
"Oh, nothing but chills and fevers. Only Tabby has a weak head, and always loses of it when she has a fever."
"Well, Miss Libby, as soon as she comes to herself, if it is in the dead of night, send some one over to the Hall to let me know, that I may come immediately; for my anxiety to ascertain my wife's fate, which she only can tell, is really insupportable."
Miss Libby promised to obey his directions, and Lyon Berners returned to Black Hall.
But not that night, nor for many nights after that, did Miss Tabby come to her senses. Her illness proved to be a low type of typhoid fever, not primarily caused, but only hastened by the depressing influences of fear and cold from her exposure to death, and to the elements, on the night of the great flood.
For many weary weeks she lay on her bed, too low to answer or even understand a question.