“I promise you, Scarlett, upon my word.”
“Thanks, Jack, thanks! I shiver when I think of it. If Kate knew, it would break her heart.”
The doctor was silent.
“When I came back with my brain reeling, I was drunk with a great joy. You know what I had fancied. O Jack! if I could forgive myself!—but I never can.”
“You are growing excited. You must be quiet, now.”
“Excited, man? Oh, it is only with my happiness. That accursed idea, born of my nervous state, was eating my very life away; while now that I know that it was but the foul emanation of my own brain, I can scarcely contain myself, and I seem to have leaped back to health and strength.”
Scales did not speak.
“But I am forgetting.—Good heavens! I have slept away the day, and the night is here. That wretched girl!”
The doctor gazed at him fixedly, asking himself if his friend’s brain was wandering.
“She promised to meet him—at some station—in London—to-night. Jack, it must be stopped before it is too late.—Where is that scoundrel Prayle?”