CHAPTER V.
COMING CONFLICTS.
Margaret stood on one side of Hilary’s pillow, and her young mistress on the other, while the latter passed her slim fingers slowly and lightly about the wounded man’s fevered forehead.
As the old servant watched her standing there in her white gown, her pale sensitive face framed in blue-black hair, her black lashes lowered over her luminous eyes, and her mouth hard set in the supreme effort of will-power exercised over the troubled nerves of the patient, the thought came to Margaret that it was truly astonishing that any one could suppose Stella Cranstoun to be the daughter of Lady Gwendolen.
Old Margaret was a silent woman, gifted with but little imagination, and her knowledge of physiognomy was not sufficiently developed to enable her to realize in what special features of the girl before her the Cranstoun characteristics were grafted on the wild Carewe growth. To Margaret’s way of thinking, Stella was not so handsome as her mother, but “a deal more ladylike and amiable.” The first Lady Cranstoun’s eyes were of a brown so dark that it appeared almost black; until her last illness her figure and her handsome red mouth was a trifle coarse in outline. There was no coarseness in Stella’s face, but behind the eyes a light seemed to shine, telling of some strange force and fire within, kept in check by a determined will. Her touch was instinct with magnetism, and soon Hilary ceased his uneasy tossing of his head on the pillows and seemed to pass from a fevered nightmare into sweet and pleasant dreams.
Some one, he thought, some one very lovely, very tender, with dark blue eyes and dusky hair, was soothing and caressing him. He could not clearly see her face in his dream-fancies, but the feeling of her presence was delightful, and presently, half-waking from what seemed a feverish sleep, he heard her voice, sweet and rippling and sounding as though it came from a long way off, speaking to some one.
“You see, Margaret, my touch has soothed him to sleep. I wish he were not a lord.”
“That is just what would make your father like him, miss.”
“And just what would make me hate him as much as he hates me.”
“Why should he hate you?”
“Because I was the cause of his accident. I heard him speak so bitterly about me to his friend. Margaret, do you think he will soon get well?”