Chrysie's wounds had healed within a fortnight, and as soon as she was able to get about she did her best to supplant Lady Olive as nurse in the sickroom.
"You may be his sister," she said, in answer to a strong protest from Lady Olive, "and you're just as good a sister as a man wants to have; but I hope I'm going to be something more than a sister; and so, if he's going to be mine and I'm going to be his, I want to do the rest. After all, you see it's only a sort of looking after one's own property."
Just at this moment Hardress woke up and turned a languid head and a pair of weary and yet eager eyes upon the two girls.
"Chrysie," he said, in a thick, hoarse whisper, and yet through smiling lips, "in the speech of your own country, you've got it in once. There's just one thing I want now to make me well. You know what it is. Come and give it me."
"Why, you mean thing!" said Chrysie, going towards the bed, "I believe you've heard everything we've been saying."
"Some of it," he whispered. "What about that reserve—that territory, you know, that I was supposed to have an option on in Buffalo?"
"Buffalo's not Boothia, Shafto," she replied, using his Christian name for the first time since they had known each other; "but the reserve's all right. I guess you've only got to take up your option when you want it."
"Then I'll take it now," he whispered again, looking weariedly and yet with an infinite longing into her eyes.
"And so you shall," she said, leaning down over the bed. "You have done the work—you and Lord Orrel and poppa. You've done everything that you said you would; you're masters of the world, and, as far as mortals can be, controllers of human destiny—you and Doctor Lamson. He began it, didn't he? If it hadn't been for him and his knowledge you'd have done nothing at all. And he's got his reward too. That's so; isn't it, Olive? Yes; you can tell the story afterwards, but you and I are going to marry two of the world masters, and we're each of us going to have a world master for father, and—well, I guess that's about all there is in it. And now I'm going to seal the contract."
She bent her head and kissed Hardress's pale but still smiling lips, and just at that moment there was a knock at the door. Lady Olive almost involuntarily said, "Come in," and Doctor Lamson, who had, next to Emil Fargeau, been the working genius of the whole vast scheme which the dead savant had worked out in his laboratory at Strassburg, came in.