"I think she did, Sir."
"You don't know what passed?"
"No, Sir. Except this, that the valet hurried out, looking very pale, and has not been back since."
"Ah!" murmured the doctor to himself. "She has suspected something, and has come on. The valet has fled. Could this scoundrel have been the guilty one? Who else could it be? And he has fled. I never liked his looks. He had the face of a vampire."
The doctor took away some of the medicine with him, and at the same time he took with him one of the glasses which stood on a table near the bed. Some liquid remained in it. He took these away to subject them to chemical analysis. The result of that analysis served to confirm his suspicions. When he next came he directed the nurse to administer the antidote regularly, and left another mixture also.
Lord Chetwynde lay between life and death. At the last verge of mortal weakness, it would have needed but a slight thing to send him out of life forever. The only encouraging thing about him for many days was that he did not get worse. From this fact the doctor gained encouragement, though he still felt that the case was desperate. What suspicions he had formed he kept to himself.
Hilda, meanwhile, prostrated by this new attack, lay helpless, consumed by the fierce fever which rioted in all her veins. Fiercer and fiercer it grew, until she reached a critical point, where her condition was more perilous than that of Lord Chetwynde himself. But, in spite of all that she had suffered, her constitution was strong. Tender hands were at her service, kindly hearts sympathized with her, and the doctor, whose nature was stirred to its depths by pity and compassion for this beautiful stranger, who had thus fallen under the power of so mysterious a calamity, was unremitting in his attentions. The crisis of the fever came, and all that night, while it lasted, he staid with her, listening to her disconnected ravings, and understanding enough of them to perceive that her fancy was bringing back before her that journey from England to Lausanne, whose fatigues and anxieties had reduced her to this.
"My God!" cried the doctor, as some sharper lamentation burst from Hilda; "it would be better for Lord Chetwynde to die than to survive a wife like this!"
With the morning the crisis had passed, and, thanks to the doctor's care, the result was favorable. Hilda fell into a profound sleep, but the fever had left her, and the change was for the better.
When the doctor returned once more he found her awake, without fever, yet very feeble.