CHAPTER XX.
BETRAYED BY A PICTURE.
Little Daisy Warburton was missing. The blow that had prostrated Leslie at its first announcement, struck Archibald Warburton with still heavier force. It was impossible to keep the truth from him, and when it became known, his feeble frame would not support the shock. At day-dawn, he lay in a death-like lethargy. At night, he was raving with delirium. And on the second day, the physicians said:
“There is no hope. His life is only a thing of days.”
Leslie and Alan were faithful at his bedside,—she, the tenderest of nurses; he, the most sleepless of watchers. But they avoided an interchange of word or glance. To all appearance, they had lost sight of themselves in the presence of these new calamities—Archibald’s hopeless condition, and the loss of little Daisy.
No time had been wasted in prosecuting the search for the missing child. When all had been done that could be done,—when monstrous rewards had been offered, when the police were scouring the city, and private detectives were making careful investigations,—Leslie and Alan took their places at the bedside of the stricken father, and waited, the heart of each heavy with a burden of unspoken fear and a new, terrible suspicion.
“Leslie! Alan!” she cried, coming toward them with a sob in her throat, “we have lost little Daisy!”—[page 155].
So two long, dreary days passed away, with no tidings from the lost and no hope for the dying.