"My French will go far enough," she thought. "At need I might have risked it."
The following day brought a sudden lapse in her husband's recovery.
"That happens often," said the physician, a bony consumptive with the manners of a man of the world and an equipment in that inexpensive courtesy which doctors are wont to assume in hopeless and poorly paying cases.
To listen to him one would think that pulmonary consumption ended in invariable improvement.
"And if something happens during the night?" Mary asked anxiously.
"Then just wait quietly until morning," the doctor said with the firm decision of a man who doesn't like to have his sleep disturbed.
Nathaniel had to stay in bed and Mary was forced to request the waiters to bring meals up to their room.
Thus passed several days, during which she scarcely left the sick-bed of her husband. And when she wasn't writing home, or reading to him from the hymn book, or cooking some easing draught upon the spirit lamp, she gazed dreamily out of the window.
She had not seen her beautiful neighbour again. With all the more attention she sought to catch any sound, any word that might give her a glimpse into the radiant Paradise of that other life.
A soft singing ushered in the day. Then followed a laughing chatter with the little maid, accompanied by the rattle of heated curling-irons and splashing of bath sponges. Occasionally, too, there was a little dispute on the subject of ribands or curls or such things. Mary's French, which was derived from the Histoire de Charles douze, the Aventures de Télémaque and other lofty books, found an end when it came to these discussions.