The doctor went out just as silently as he had entered, and Sarah heard the study door softly close, when once more she uttered the same low, moaning sigh, and rocked herself to and fro in her chair as she seemed to see the hard, thin face of her husband gazing straight at her, as she had seen it when he was dying in their cottage, and laying upon her the terrible duty she was to fulfil.
How long she sat like that she could not tell, but hours must have passed unnoted—hours during which, with eyes unvisited by sleep, she had gone on and on through her old life, and the scenes, when her husband had returned from his work, bitterly reviling Gartram for some real or fancied wrong, and then a light seemed to flash into the room like the light she had been expecting, and the doctor stood before her with a curious, intense look in his countenance, one she recalled vividly as having been there on the day her husband died.
Meanwhile Claude and Mary had sat talking for some time about the strange ending of the evening. Claude, in spite of her anxiety on her father’s behalf, feeling half pleased, half frightened by Glyddyr’s acts.
He appeared so strange, she thought, so shrinking in her presence, and so fearful of intruding upon her, even to be ready to go away.
Was this the man’s real love for her? Did he really care for her? and was she misjudging him in thinking that his desire was for her future prospects alone—her money?
She shuddered with dread lest he really should love her, and then her heart sank lower and lower, for the stern, upbraiding look of Chris Lisle was before her. The face of the boy companion, for whom she had always felt a warm affection, one which she knew in her heart, though she had not confessed it, had ripened into woman’s love for man.
“Are we going to sit up, or try to sleep, Claude?” said Mary at last.
“I am going to sit up, Mary. You are going to lie down and sleep.”
“Doctor Asher said that we were both to lie down and rest.”
“Yes; and you will do so. I could not sleep if I did. It is impossible.”