"You will wear yourself out, Allan?" she remonstrated.
"No, mother—there is plenty of wear in me. I almost hate myself for being so strong and so full of life while he is lying there——"
Tears ended the sentence.
At last the hands of the clock, which mother and son had both been watching, pointed to eleven, and the hour struck with slow and silvery sound. Then came ten minutes of expectancy, and then the cautious tread of the family practitioner and the consulting physician coming upstairs together.
Allan and his mother went out to the corridor to see them. A few murmured words only, and the two dark figures vanished through the door of the sick-room, and mother and son were alone once more, waiting, waiting with aching hearts and strained ears, that listened for every sound on the other side of the closed door.
The doctors were some time with the patient, and then they went downstairs, and were closeted together in the library for a time that seemed very long to those who waited for the result of their consultation. Those anxious watchers had followed them downstairs, and were standing beside the expiring fire in the hall, waiting as for the voice of fate. The dining-room door was open. A table laid for supper, with glass and silver shining under the lamplight, and the glow of a blazing fire, suggested comfort and good cheer—and seemed to accentuate the gloom in the hearts of the watchers.
What were they talking about, those two in the closed room yonder, Allan wondered. Was their talk all of the sufferer upstairs, and the means of alleviating pain and staving off the inevitable end? or did they wander from that question of life and death to the futilities of everyday conversation—and so lengthen out the agony of those who were waiting for their verdict? At last the door opened, and the two doctors came out into the hall, very grave still, but less gloomy than they had looked in the morning, Lady Emily thought.
"He is better—decidedly better than he was twelve hours ago," said the physician. "We have tided over the immediate peril."
"And he is out of danger?" questioned Allan, eagerly.
"He is out of danger for the moment. He may go on for some time without a recurrence of this morning's attack; but I am bound to tell you that the danger may recur at any time. What has happened must be regarded—I am sorry to be obliged to say it—as the beginning of the end."