What if his injuries were fatal—and he should die? Then, ah, then she would be free to recall John Dinsmore, the man she had found out to her bitter cost that she really loved—and marry him.
No wonder she started guiltily at the bare notion that the stranger with the piercing eyes was reading her very heart thoughts. She made an effort to answer the doctor’s remark with seeming agitation, caused by grief.
Pressing her dainty point-lace handkerchief to her eyes she murmured behind its folds: “If his recovery depends on his being carefully nursed, you may be sure that we will have him up and about as quickly as it can be accomplished.”
“I am sure of it, madam,” replied the doctor, with a low bow. “I shall send a trained nurse to you immediately,” he went on briskly, “and in the meantime, I would ask that you administer the powders which I shall leave you, every fifteen minutes. Failure to do this would be fatal.”
“I will attend to it myself, until the nurse you speak of arrives,” she murmured.
Promising to return in the course of an hour or two at the very latest, the doctor took his leave.
Glancing furtively about, Queenie did not see the stranger who had stood beside the doctor, and she concluded that he must have been an assistant, and that he left with the doctor. Still, the lurid gaze of those eyes haunted her—she could not tell why.
“Ah! I have it!” she cried fiercely, at length, after she had dismissed the servants, telling them that she would watch beside her husband’s couch, and that she would call upon them when she needed them. “Yes; I know now where I have seen just such eyes. They looked out at me from the face of false, fickle Raymond Challoner, that never-to-be-forgotten day at Newport, when he stood before me and told me that our betrothal which had lasted just one day, would have to be broken if I had been so unfortunate as to lose the vast fortune which I was credited with having.
“It was in that bitter hour that I learned the worth of a true love, such as John Dinsmore’s, which I had flung away for the idle fancy of such a creature as Raymond Challoner.
“Raymond Challoner, you who ruined my life, where are you now, I wonder? If we ever meet again, just as surely as I live, I will take a horrible vengeance upon you.