What was it the doctor had said? Again and again those parting words came back to her. The father should be summoned. But to summon him, to reveal her hiding-place, and then have her darling taken from her, saved from the grasp of death only to be torn from her by his pitiless unforgiving father! No thought of what Daniel Granger had been to her in all the days of her married life arose to comfort or reassure her. She only thought of him as he had been after that fatal meeting in her brother's painting-room; and she hoped for no mercy from him.
"And even if I were willing to send for him, I don't know where he is," she said at last helplessly.
Jane Target urged her to summon him.
"If you was to send a telegraft to the Court, mum, Miss Granger is pretty sure to be there, and she'd send to her pa, wherever he was."
Clarissa shivered. Send to Miss Granger! suffer those cold eyes to see the depth of her humiliation! That would be hard to endure. Yet what did anything in the world matter to her when her boy was in jeopardy?
"We shall save him, Jane," she said with a desperate hopefulness, clasping her hands and bending down to kiss the troubled little one, who had brief snatches of sleep now and then in weary hours of restlessness. "We shall save him. The doctor said so."
"God grant we may, mum! But the doctor didn't say for certain—he only said he hoped; and it would be so much better to send for master. It seems a kind of crime not to let him know; and if the poor dear should grow worse—"
"He will not grow worse!" cried Clarissa hysterically. "What, Jane! are you against me? Do you want me to be robbed of him, as his father would rob me without mercy? No, I will keep him, I will keep him! Nothing but death shall take him from me."
Later in the evening, restless with the restlessness of a soul tormented by fear, Clarissa began to grow uneasy about her letter to Dr. Ormond. It might miscarry in going through the postoffice. She was not quite sure that it had been properly directed, her mind had been so bewildered when she wrote it. Or Dr. Ormond might have engagements next morning, and might not be able to come. She was seized with a nervous anxiety about this.
"If there were any one I could send with another note," she said.