“Yes, she looks—as she has always done since I can remember—like a person superior to all mortal feebleness.”
“She is superior to all other women I have ever met, a woman of truly remarkable power and steadfastness; but with natures like hers the sword is sometimes stronger than the scabbard. That slender, upright form has an appearance of physical delicacy, as well as natural refinement. Your aunt’s mind is a tower of strength, Mrs. Greswold. She has been my strong rock from the beginning of my ministry here; but I tremble for the hour when her health may break down under the task-work she exacts from herself.”
“I know that she has a district, but I do not know the details of her work,” said Mildred. “Is it very hard?”
“It is very hard, and very continuous. She labours unremittingly among the poor, and she does a great deal of work of a wider and more comprehensive kind. She is deaf to no appeal to her charity. The most distant claims receive her thoughtful attention, even where she does not feel it within the boundary-line of her duty to give substantial aid. She writes more letters than many a private secretary; and, O Mrs. Greswold—to you as very near and dear to her—I may say what I would say to no other creature living. It has been my blessed office to be brought face to face with her in the sacrament of confession. I have seen the veil lifted from that white and spotless soul; spotless, yes, in a world of sinners! I know what a woman your aunt is.”
His low searching tones fell distinctly upon Mildred’s ear, yet hardly rose above a whisper. The babble, lay and clerical, went on in the other drawing-room, and these two were as much alone in the shadow of the window-curtains and the gray light of the fading day as if they had been priest and penitent in a confessional.
CHAPTER VI.
HIGHER VIEWS.
After that interview with her husband, which in her own mind meant finality, Mildred Greswold’s strength succumbed suddenly, and for more than a week she remained in a state of health for which Miss Fausset’s doctor could find no name more specific than low fever. She was not very feverish, he told her aunt. The pulse was rapid and intermittent, but the temperature was not much above the normal limit. She was very weak and low, and she wanted care. He had evidently not quite made up his mind whether she wanted rousing or letting alone—whether he would recommend her to spend the winter at Chamounix and do a little mountaineering, or to vegetate at Nice or Algiers. “We must watch her,” he said gravely. “She must not be allowed to go into a decline.”
Miss Fausset looked alarmed at this, but her doctor, an acquaintance of fifteen years, assured her that there was no cause for alarm; there was only need of care and watchfulness.
“Her mother died at six-and-thirty,” said Miss Fausset—“faded away gradually, without any ostensible disease. My brother did everything that care and forethought could do, but he could not save her.”
“Mrs. Greswold must not be allowed to fade away,” replied the doctor, with an air of being infallible.