The thought of "that nice Dr. Fergusson" recurred to the little lady more than once that evening, when she sat writing in the sitting-room, whilst Christina performed Baba's evening toilette.
"He makes me think of John," so Cicely's thoughts ran; "he has the same kind understanding eyes—brown, like John's—and the same gentle way with him that John had. I think he knew how lonely it feels for me sometimes, and what a big responsibility life is, for one little scrap of a woman like me."
And, indeed, strangely enough, thoughts not at all unlike these, were passing through Denis Fergusson's mind, as he drove rapidly back to Pinewood Lodge; and, whilst he ate his solitary meal that evening, in Dr. Stokes's trim dining-room, furnished in precisely the way Fergusson himself would not have furnished it, he found Cicely's delicately fair face, and soft blue eyes constantly rising before his mental vision; he found himself wondering what manner of man her husband had been, and whether those blue eyes had been lighted with love for that dead man's sake.
"She looked like some lovely, pathetic child when she talked to me to-day," so his reflections ran "she and that fascinating Baba of hers, are just a pair of babies together, and yet—all the woman and the mother are in her, too," and, glancing round the formal room, Fergusson sighed, and made a great effort to turn his thoughts away from sudden alluring dreams of a home of his own, a home that would be really a home, not merely a place in which to live, where the centre of all its peace and happiness would be—his wife.
His wife? He laughed aloud, a little short laugh that rang discordantly in his ears. It was quite improbable that he would ever be able to afford to ask any woman to marry him, much less a dainty, delicately nurtured woman who—who——
Back into his mind flashed the picture which he had been resolutely thrusting from him, the picture of a lovely face, like some exquisite flower rising above a cloud of filmy lace and soft dark furs, the big feathers in her hat drooping against the gold of her hair. It was on Mrs. Nairne's doorstep that he had first met Cicely, and the picture of her as he saw her then in the pale wintry sunlight, seemed to haunt him all the more persistently, because side by side with it, he saw another, and strangely different picture. His own house in a South London road, its sordid surroundings, its unsavoury neighbourhood, all these made Cicely and her daintiness, seem like some princess belonging to another world.
"Pshaw, you poor fool!" Fergusson ejaculated aloud, when, his dinner ended, he retired to smoke in a small den, dignified by the name of smoking-room; "the sooner Dr. Stokes comes back and you clear out from here and return to the sober realities of life in Southwark, the better for you. Dreaming dreams and seeing visions is no part of your vocation."
He had reached this stage of his meditations, and had drawn up a chair to the writing-table, with a grim determination to finish an article for a medical journal, when the parlourmaid entering, handed him an exceedingly grubby note. It was briefly worded—
"Please come at once. He is dying."
There was no address, and the only signature was the one letter "M," but Fergusson at once understood what the message portended. The car, hurriedly ordered, was soon waiting for him at the front door; and, telling the man he would drive himself, the doctor glided quickly away in the direction of the lonely house in the valley.