Uncle Joseph stared. "It's not so with me," he answered; "far from it. I wish I didn't care so much. I'm a desperate fidget sometimes, I know, and often I can't enjoy things just for fear of what might happen. Perhaps it's because I'm an old bachelor, as they say. It's a great drawback to a man in middle-age to have passed all his youth out of the society of women."
Sir Henry smiled and shook his head.
"I haven't found the other plan a good one," said he. "You and I have been a goodish time in the world now, and I begin to think we have both wasted our lives."
CHAPTER XXXII.
"RECLAIMED."
Day after day, week after week, an autumn sun glared fiercely down, baking and cracking the clean shorn stubbles, burnishing the meadows, all parched and smooth and shining, licking up with fiery thirst the shrunken threads of mountain streams, scorching the heather bloom to powder, burning to rich ripeness the strips of late-sown oats that through our wild hill-countries fringe the purple moorland with a border of gold, beating on heated wall and glowing pavement in the small close streets about the Marlborough Road, drying the outer air to the temperature of an oven, and withering without pity the humble little growth of mignionette in the sick child's window.
Morning and night Jin watered that homely box of mould in vain. The dying plants no more revived for her care, than did her darling for all the tears she shed on his behalf. They wanted for nothing now that money could supply,—Kate Cremorne would have taken care of that; but Jin's friends, directly they found out her hiding-place, had rallied round her with kindly offers of sympathy and assistance. Mrs. Lascelles, indeed, wished to bring mother and child home to No. 40 at once, but the latter was too ill to be moved; and kind-hearted Rose, in spite of her present happiness, felt sadly vexed to think that the former could refuse persistently to see her now, denying herself to every human being except Miss Cremorne.
With all her resolution it was more than Jin could endure to be reminded of the happiness she had once so nearly grasped, and in her dull, forlorn misery she told herself it was better to hide her weary head, and wait in hopeless apathy for the end.
She had gone through those cruel changes that seem so hard to bear till the one fearful certainty teaches us they were merciful preparations for that which we should not otherwise have found strength to encounter. She had watched the doctor's face day by day, and hung on his grave, sympathising accents, believing now that the "shade better" meant recovery, now that the "trifle worse" was but the necessary ebb and flow of disease; anon, lifted to unreasonable happiness from darkest despair, because when her ignorance thought all was over, the man of science still found anchorage for a new ephemeral hope.