The nurse smiled, and left him to his thoughts, which now came freely enough—too freely to help him to convalescence.
It was late in the evening when the nurse came to announce that there were visitors; and after a few grave firm words, bidding him be calm, she left him, and returned with Janet and Richmond, both trembling and agitated, to grasp his hands, and fight hard against the desire to throw themselves sobbing upon his breast.
The nurse remained, not from curiosity, but to watch over her patient, whom she had literally dragged from the grasp of death, while, after the first loving words, Mark Heath gazed at Richmond in a troubled way, and proceeded to tell of his adventures.
“But did you really bring back a bag of diamonds, Mark, or is it—”
“Fancy,” he said bitterly. “No; it is no fancy. I have been delirious, Jenny; but I am sane enough now. I had the bag of diamonds, and over a hundred pounds in gold, in a belt about my waist. Rich, darling, I was silent during these past two years; for I vowed that I would not write again till I could come back to you and say I have fulfilled my promise, and now I have come to you a beggar.”
“Yes,” said Richmond, laying her hand in his, as an ineffably sweet look of content beamed from her eyes in his, and there was tender yearning love in every tone of her sweet deep voice; “but you have come back alive after we had long mourned you as dead.”
“Better that I had been,” he said bitterly. “Better that that dark night’s work had been completed than I should have come back a beggar.”
Janet and Richmond exchanged glances; which with a sick man’s suspicion he noted, and his brow contracted.
“They doubt me,” he thought.
“But you have come back, Mark. We are young; and there is our life before us. I do not complain,” said Richmond gently. “We must wait.”