"No—o," Christina faltered, whilst, unbidden, there flashed into her mind the vision of a rugged face, and two grey eyes full of hidden pain, "but—I think I can understand," she ended shyly.
"You dear little girl," the two hot hands drew her down, and Christina felt a gentle kiss on her cheek; "some day you will know, if I judge your eyes aright. Nature did not give you those eyes, and that face for nothing. I wonder——" the woman's glance suddenly concentrated itself upon the girl. "I wonder why something in your face seems to me familiar. Can I ever have seen you before?"
"No, I could not ever forget you if I had seen you," Christina answered quickly; and the other, though she smiled, still looked into the girl's face with a puzzled expression.
Half an hour later, Christina, upon whom her responsibilities weighed with double heaviness, now that she had realised the presence of the sick man in the house, went to visit the room along the passage. The patient there was now in bed, and the girl observed that the look of intense exhaustion had left his face, and that he was breathing normally and quietly.
"Tell Madge I am quite all right," he said, his voice sounding stronger than before; "don't let her worry about me. She must rest herself if she is tired. Tell her I shall sleep like a top!"
To Christina the night that followed was one of her most curious experiences. In a strange house, with people of whose very names she was ignorant, and about whom hung a mystery, the nature of which was unknown to her, she felt as though she had become part of a story, or of a puzzling dream, from which she should presently awake in her own bed at Graystone, with Baba's cot beside her.
Wrapped in her thick dressing-gown she sat by the fire in the room of the woman, who in her own mind she called "the beautiful lady," sometimes turning the leaves of a book she had found on the table, sometimes looking dreamily at the flickering flames. In accordance with the doctor's orders, she occasionally fed her patient, who, though very wide-awake, spoke but little during the long night hours. Christina, by the light of the softly-shaded lamp, could see how seldom her companion's eyes were closed, how almost continually they were fixed, either upon her, or upon the firelit walls.
Once or twice she uttered some brief remark, but no word was said that made clear to the watching girl any of the strange happenings in this strange house. But when the grey light of dawn was beginning to steal through the window curtains, the woman in the bed said gently:
"It was wonderfully good of you to come here and take care of me like this. I wonder whether you are thinking you have come into a place of mad people?"
"No, I did not think that."