"Yes, Mr. Sheldon. I cannot sleep while Lotta is so ill."
"Humph! I suppose you mean to get yourself on the sick-list, and give us another invalid to nurse."
"I will not trouble you to nurse me if I should be ill."
"Ah!" growled the stockbroker, as he went to his own room, "you are a pack of silly women altogether; and your fine friend Hawkehurst is more womanish than the silliest of you. Goodnight."
He went into his own room, where he found his wife still awake. Her weak lamentings and bewailings were insupportable to him; and at three o'clock he went downstairs, put on his boots and a light overcoat, and went out into the dim regions of Bayswater, whence he saw the sun rise red above the eastern roofs and chimneys, and where he walked until the first clatter of hoofs and roll of wheels began to echo through the empty streets, and, with faint distant cries of sweeps and milk-women, life's chorus recommenced.
It was seven o'clock when he went back to his house, and let himself in softly with his latchkey. He knew that he had been walking a long time, and that he had seen the sun rise; but what streets or squares he had been walking in he did not know. He crept upstairs to his dressing-room with stealthy footsteps, and made an elaborate toilet. At eight o'clock he was seated at breakfast in the hastily-arranged dining-room, with the newspapers by the side of his cup and saucer. At nine he went into the hall to receive Dr. Jedd and Dr. Doddleson, who arrived almost simultaneously. His carefully-arranged hair and whiskers, his well made unpretentious clothes, his spotless linen, would have done credit to an archbishop. Of all the cares and calculations of his long dreary night there was no trace, except a certain dulness in his eyes, and the dark half-circles below them.
CHAPTER IV.
COUNTING THE COST.
For four days and four nights there were fear and watching in Mr. Sheldon's house; and in all that time the master never quitted it, except stealthily, in the dead of the night, or at early daybreak, to roam in a purposeless manner he knew not where. The doctors came and went—Dr. Doddleson once a day, Dr. Jedd two or three times a day—and every one in villas adjoining and villas opposite, and even in villas round the corner, knew that the stockbroker's stepdaughter lay sick unto death; for the white horses of Dr. Jedd's landau were as the pale horse of the Pale Rider himself, and where they came was danger or death. Ah, thank God! to some they have brought hope and blessing; not always the dread answer, "You have called me in vain."
Valentine Hawkehurst came many times in the day, but between him and Mr. Sheldon there could be no safe meeting; and the lover came quietly to the little gate, where a kindly housemaid gave him a little note from Diana Paget. Miss Paget wrote half a dozen little notes of this kind in the course of every day, but she never left her post in the room opposite the sick-chamber. She complained of headache, or of some vague illness which prevented her taking her meals in the dining-room, and Mr. Sheldon was fain to be satisfied with this explanation of her conduct.