Chris, seeing that the avowals he had been making caused him pain and bitter mortification, took his hands, and raising them to her face, laid them tenderly against her cheek.
“That is a trouble you will have no more,” she said, softly. “And you can hear now, can you not?”
“I can hear fairly well on one side now,” he answered. “I can hear some days better than others. I am under treatment by one of the great London aurists. He says that if I had been brought to him sooner he could have cured me completely; as it is, the hearing in the right ear is completely gone, and in the left it is permanently impaired.”
Chris began to sob, and Dick had to comfort her.
“Don’t, don’t cry, my darling; I shall make you as melancholy as myself if I don’t take care—you, who used to be all life and brightness.”
“I haven’t been very lively since you went away,” answered Chris. “I have been very ill. I thought you were de—ead!” And she shuddered. “I thought I saw you carried out—dead—over the grass—hanging over a man’s shoulder!”
“I was carried over a man’s shoulder, I believe, only I wasn’t dead,” answered Dick simply. “It was Stelfox’s doing.”
Chris looked puzzled.
“It was in the evening of the day that they found out I had been writing to you,” said she. “Had that anything to do with it?”
Dick listened with interest.