Between surprise and emotion Sir Everard could not answer. He thought the idea of death would be both strange and repugnant to so thoughtless a creature; and he marvelled to hear him speak of it.
"You'll promise, won't you, father? You know I couldn't live like that! Let me go and live with mother in Heaven. See," pointing to the picture, "how happy I was in her arms when I was a baby, and I want to lie there again so much! Just now, when I thought it was still the night Miles was ill, before I knew I should never walk or run any more, even then I wanted so to get ill and die, that I might go to her, and I want it more than ever now. I thought then I never could get ill, because I am so strong; but now I am ill, and so you'll let me die! Promise not to try and make me well?"
Three times Sir Everard strove to answer, and three times his voice failed him. He managed, however, to murmur something which sounded like an affirmative, which satisfied and quieted the child.
But much of the boy's speech had been wholly unintelligible to him, and his allusions to his mother's picture especially puzzled him. Looking upon the drawing-room as a closed room, he had no idea that the children ever penetrated into it, or that they knew of the existence of the picture. And laying his hand on the child's head, he said: "How did you know that was your mother, Humphrey?"
The boy shot at him a glance of such astonishment that Sir Everard felt rebuked, and did not like to continue the conversation; and the doctors, returning at that moment, it was not resumed.
This time, Humphrey made no resistance, and the physicians were able to make their examination.
Leaving the village doctor by the bedside, Sir Everard led the way to the library, to hear their opinion.
He hardly knew what he wished. Humphrey's horror at his impending fate had made such an impression on Sir Everard that he almost shrank from hearing the child would recover to such a life as that. And yet when the doctors told him his boy must die, a revulsion of feeling swept over him, and his rebellious heart cried, "Anything but that!"