"There would," replied the doctor. "Nature is quick to reassert herself. But if you are about to test your butler, I should recommend you to remain away longer than a week—say a fortnight."
But it was not to test his old servant that Douglas Dale absented himself from London, though he had allowed the physician to believe that such was his intention. He started for Paris that night; but he took Jarvis with him.
His health improved day by day, hour by hour, from the day of his parting from Paulina Durski. The low fever had left him before he had been ten days in Paris; the perpetual thirst, the wearisome debility, left him also. He began to be his old self again; and to him this recovery was far more terrible than the worst possible symptoms of disease could have been, for it told him that the hidden foe who had robbed him of health and strength, was to be found at Hilton House.
In that house there was but one person who would profit by Douglas
Dale's death, and she would profit largely.
"She has never loved me," he thought to himself. "She still loves Reginald Eversleigh. My death will give her both fortune and liberty; it will leave her free to wed the man she really loves."
He no longer trusted his own love. He believed that he had been made the dupe of a woman's treachery; and that the hand which had so often been pressed passionately to his lips, was the hand which, day by day, had mingled poison with his cup, sapping his life by slow degrees. Against the worldly wisdom of his friends he had opposed the blind instinct of his love; and now that events conspired to condemn this woman, he wondered that he could ever have trusted her.
At the end of a fortnight Douglas Dale returned from Paris, and went immediately to Paulina. He believed that he had been the dupe of an accomplished actress—the vilest and most heartless of women—and he was now acting a part, in order to fathom the depth of her iniquity.
"Let me know her—let me know her in all her baseness," he said to himself. "Let me tax the murderess with her crime! and then, surely, this mad love will be plucked for ever from my heart, and I shall find peace far from the false syren whose sorcery has embittered my life."
Douglas had received several letters from Paulina during his visit to Paris—letters breathing the most devoted and disinterested love; but to him every word seemed studied, every expression false. Those very letters would, a few short weeks ago, have seemed to Douglas the perfection of truth and artlessness.
He returned to England wondrously restored to health. Jarvis had been his constant attendant in Paris, and had brought him every morning a cup of coffee made by his own hands.