“But will you not let me see him, and help you in nursing him? It was for this purpose alone that I stayed here when all the others went. Let me at least be near him, that I may feel myself to be making such poor reparation as my heedlessness requires.”
She could hardly resist his earnest entreaty, and besides, she was won by compassion for his evident distress.
“You may come, Mr Kennedy, as often as you like; whenever Arthur is capable of seeing you, you shall visit his sick-room.”
“Thank you,” he said, and she perceived the tremble of deep emotion in his voice.
He came the next morning, and she allowed him to see De Vayne. He entered noiselessly, and gazed for a moment as he stood at the door on the pale wasted face, looking still paler in contrast with the long dark hair that flowed over the pillow. He was awake, but there was no consciousness in his dark dreamy eyes.
As De Vayne murmured to himself in low sentences, Kennedy heard repeatedly the name of Violet, and once of Violet Home. He sat still as death, and soon gathered from the young lord’s broken words, his love, his deep love for Julian’s sister.
And when Kennedy first recognised this fact, which had hitherto been quite unknown to him, for a moment a flood of jealousy and bitter envy filled his heart. What if Violet should give up her troth in favour of a wealthier, perhaps worthier lover? What if her family should think his own poor claims no barrier to the hope that Violet should one day wear a coronet? The image of Julian and Violet rose in his fancy, and with one more pang of self-reproach, he grew ashamed of his unworthy suspicions.
Yet the thought that De Vayne, too, had fixed his affections on Violet filled him with uneasiness and foreboding, and he determined, on some future occasion, to save pain to all parties, by getting Julian to break to De Vayne the secret of his sister’s betrothal.
For several days he came to the sick-room, and a woman could hardly have been more thoughtful and tender than he was to his friend. It was on about the fourth evening that De Vayne awoke to complete consciousness. He became aware that some one besides his mother was seated in the room, and without asking he seemed slowly to recognise that it was Kennedy.
“Is that Kennedy?” he asked, in a weak voice.