He looked at her with consuming eagerness. “You have been gone so long,” he said, a little thickly. “Where is Cousin Alitza?”
A muffled shriek from Mrs. Mancredo thrilled through the room.
“You know what he means!” asserted Ethelbert, looking at Mrs. Mancredo, who, with a perfectly bloodless face and a shrinking, stealthy step, approached. Reginald Grove looked at her puzzled, and then said fretfully, lifting his eyes to Ethelbert: “You have all been gone so long; see how she has grown.”
There was an oppressive hush of bewilderment. The doctor was held back by the unmoved air with which Ethelbert kept her post, giving way to her as if she were the physician of the occasion in whom he trusted. She stood, gently stroking Reginald’s head. He raised his other hand and patted hers languidly, as a pleased child would do, and so presently fell asleep. Then the other physicians came in, and a little apart discussed the case, perplexed.
“He called you Alitza. Your card was marked Corrinne,” said Ethelbert; and after scarce a moment’s halt Mrs. Mancredo said with truthful rapidity: “I am—I was—Alitza Corrinne Roccoca, his cousin. I have seen him but twice since I was seventeen, until I met him in this city. He loved me when we were children; he hated me when I was older. He never dreamed that Mrs. Mancredo was—is—Alitza.”
Ethelbert was silent; she was thinking of his perplexed words: “You have all been away so long; see how she has grown,” and of the childlike manner in which he had clung to her and called her “mother.” She remembered a curious case of mental-aberration of which she had read. “Doctors,” she said, “your patient’s mind has become blank, back to the time before his mother’s death. Don’t you see? He thinks I am his mother; and his mother passed away when he was five years old. He is a child again; that is all.”
“Yes, but a paralyzed one,” said the physicians.
CHAPTER IV.
The doctor motioned them all to come with him to an adjoining room. And then Mrs. Mancredo told all she knew about the rosebud which had become associated in Reginald’s mind with his early life, and of the conversation which had taken place between them the night of his attack, adding:
“I was in the family when he was a little fellow, before auntie died. We parted after that, and only met a few times when I was a tall, thin, sallow girl; and—and he did not know me when we met again here at this hotel this summer, in my robust maturity. He isn’t quick, Reginald isn’t, and I’ve puzzled him my share, one way and another. He has been getting in a bad way, poor Regie, and here’s the end of it.”