"My dear lady, these things are ordered by a Wisdom beyond our comprehension," the doctor answered gently. That picture of a disconsolate mother was very common to him—only Clarissa was so much lovelier than most of the mothers, and her grief had a more romantic aspect and touched him a little more than usual. "Believe me, I shall make every effort to pull the little fellow through," he added with the professional air of hopefulness. "Have you written to Dr. Ormond?"
"Yes, my letter was posted an hour after you called."
"Then we shall hear what he says to-morrow. You can have no higher opinion. And now pray, my dear Mrs. Graham"—Clarissa had called herself Graham in these Soho lodgings—"pray keep up your spirits; remember your own health will suffer if you give way—and I really do not think you are strong."
He looked at her curiously as he spoke. She was deadly pale, and had a haggard look which aged her by ten years: beauty less perfect in its outline would have been obscured by that mental anguish—hers shone through all, ineffaceable.
"Do not forget what I said about the little one's father," urged the doctor, lingering for a minute on the threshold. "There is really too great a responsibility in keeping him ignorant of the case, if he is anywhere within reach."
Clarissa smiled for the first time since her boy's illness—a strange wan smile. She was thinking how Daniel Granger had threatened her with separation from her child; and now Death had come between them to snatch him from both.
"My son!" She remembered the proud serenity, the supreme sense of possession, with which she had pronounced those words.
And the child would die perhaps, and Daniel Granger never look upon his face again. A great terror came into her mind at that thought. What would her husband say to her if he came to claim his boy, and found him dead? For the first time since she had left him—triumphant in the thought of having secured this treasure—the fact that the boy belonged to him, as well as to herself, came fully home to her. From the day of the baby's birth she had been in the habit of thinking of him as her own—hers by a right divine almost—of putting his father out of the question, as it were—only just tolerating to behold that doating father's fond looks and caresses—watching all communion between those two with a lurking jealousy.
Now all at once she began to feel what a sacred bond there was between the father and son, and how awful a thing it would be, if Daniel Granger should find his darling dead. Might he not denounce her as the chief cause of his boy's death? Those hurried journeys by land and sea—that rough shifting to and fro of the pampered son and heir, whose little life until that time had been surrounded with such luxurious indulgences, so guarded from the faintest waft of discomfort—who should say that these things had not jeopardised the precious creature? And out of her sin had this arisen. In that dread hour by her darling's sick-bed, what unutterably odious colours did her flirtation with George Fairfax assume—her dalliance with temptation, her weak hankering after that forbidden society! She saw, as women do see in that clear after-light which comes with remorse, all the guilt and all the hatefulness of her sin.
"God gave me my child for my redemption," she said to herself, "and I went on sinning."