'And this was "the startling news" that made you so suddenly leave Edinburgh?'
'To come here in search of you. Oh, Jack! I was mad to doubt you; but you would quite pardon me if you knew all I have undergone. Shall I ever forget the night she came—the night of that aimless flight south—aimless, save to avoid you—but ending at York? Oh never, Jack, if I lived a thousand years! I now know that it takes a great deal to kill some people; yet I think that, but for dear, affectionate Hester, I could not have lived very long with that awful and never-ceasing pain gnawing at my heart.'
Jack raised her quivering face between his tremulous hands, and looked into it fondly and yearningly. How full of affection it seemed—so softly radiant with shy and lovely blushes, while her eyes of forget-me-not blue never, even in the past, shone with the love-light that illumined them now, when sufferings were past and their memory becoming fainter.
'How long—how long it seems since we separated, and without a farewell, Jack!'
'A day sometimes seems an age—ay, even a day, when matters of the heart are concerned.'
'And a minute or two may undo the work of years—yea, of a lifetime. But you must get well and strong, Jack, for the homeward voyage. In a few days we shall have you laughing among us again; and you will see what a careful little nurse I shall prove.'
Jack, withal, feared just then that there was but little laughter left for him on earth; yet their reunion and the presence of Maude acted as a wonderful charm upon him, and from her loving little hands, instead of those of a stolid hospital orderly, he now took his prescribed 'baby food' as he called it—beef-tea, eggs beat up in milk, and port wine elixir, with the odious 'diluted hydrochloric acid, one drachm, and of quinine, eight drachms,' as ordered by the medical staff.
But he rallied rapidly, though Maude's heart beat painfully when occasionally a ray of sunshine stole into the room through the picturesque lattice-wood windows (which in Cairo had not been superseded by glass) and rested on his face, and she saw how pale and wan, if peaceful and bright, the latter was now: and then if he spoke too much, she placed her white hands on his lips, or silenced them more sweetly but quite as effectually.
Hester, when she first saw Jack Elliot, little imagined that he would recover so rapidly. She had thought of Maude and then of her own father.
'Strange it is,' pondered the girl, 'that when one sorrow comes upon us—a shock unexpectedly—we seem to see the gradual approach of another, and so realize its bitterness before it becomes an actual fact. Thus I felt, long before poor papa died, that I should be alone and penniless in the world.'