Eveline uttered a low wail, and fainted. A cry of terror escaped Clairette, who drew away the pillows from under her mistress's head, opened the collar of her laced night-dress, to let the air play freely about her delicate neck and white bosom, while she bathed her temples freely with Rimmel and Eau-de-Cologne; and Miss Hurdell, whose nature was somewhat hard, and who had never seen anyone faint before, looked on with some fear and suspicion, as animation slowly came back to the lovely face, with gasping sobs on the lips and heavy respirations, which made her bosom heave and fall.
George Eliot says, with truth, 'It is a wonderful moment the first time we stand by one who has fainted, and witness the fresh birth of consciousness spreading itself over the blank features like the rising sunlight on the Alpine summits that lay ghastly and dead under the leaden twilight. A slight shudder, and the frost-bound eyes recover their liquid light, for an instant they show the inward semi-consciousness of an infant, then with a little start they open wider, and begin to look, the present is visible, but only as a strange writing, and the interpreter memory is not yet there.'
The dull mental agony that comes after acute anguish or a great shock, proved too much for Eveline now, and she became prostrate, seriously ill in the hands of her new friends, and Clairette wrote instantly to Olive Raymond.
Eveline at times burst into passionate sobs, then she would lie very still with her long lashes closed and the tears oozing from under them, slowly down her pale cheeks, though her slender throat would be agitated by those after-sobs that seem so uncontrollable. Other times she would lie perfectly still, lost in deep thought, as she pictured all the past and tender love her manly brother had ever borne her, and how gently he pitied her, when he discovered her love for the lost Evan Cameron.
'The devil!' said Sir Harry to himself, as he smoked a cigar on the terrace under her windows, and looked up there from time to time and twirled his long fair moustache; 'who could have imagined all this! She must have loved that old fellow after all.'
'In the light of a father, perhaps,' suggested Mr. Pyke Poole.
'Of course—you are right; how else could she have looked upon him. Her sorrow must be for her brother.'
'Perhaps both.'
'Who the devil are all those cads crossing the park?' exclaimed Sir Harry, with sudden anger, perhaps at his friend's mild suggestion.
'The coroner's inquest.'