They did not speak of it further. Gifford was already reproaching himself for having let his patient talk too much, and Mr. Denner, his mind at last at rest, was ready to fall asleep, the miniature clasped in his feverish hand.
The next day, Gifford had no good news to carry to the rectory. The lawyer had had a bad night, and was certainly weaker, and sometimes he seemed a little confused when he spoke. Gifford shrank from telling Lois this, and yet he longed to see her, but she did not appear.
She was with Mrs. Forsythe, her aunt said; and when he asked for the invalid, Mrs. Dale shook her head. "I asked her how she felt this morning, and she said, 'Still breathing!' But she certainly is pretty sick, though she's one to make herself out at the point of death if she scratches her finger. Still—I don't know. I call her a sick woman."
Mrs. Dale could not easily resign the sense of importance which attends the care of a very sick person, even though Arabella Forsythe's appetite had unquestionably improved.
"We've telegraphed again for her son," she went on, "though I must say she does not seem to take his absence much to heart. They are the sort of people, I think, that love each other better at a distance. Now, if I were in her place, I'd be perfectly miserable without my children. I don't know what to think of his not writing to her. It appears that he's on a pleasure party of some kind, and he's not written her a line since he started; so of course she does not know where he is."
But to Lois Mrs. Forsythe's illness was something beside interest and occupation. The horror of her possible death hung over the young girl, and seemed to sap her youth and vigor. Her face was drawn and haggard, and her pleasant gray eyes had lost their smile. Somehow Mr. Denner's danger, which to some extent she realized, did not impress her so deeply; perhaps because that was, in a manner, the result of his own will, and perhaps, too, because no one quite knew how much the little gentleman suffered and how near death he was.
Lois had heard Gifford's voice as she went into the sick-room, and his words of blame rung again in her ears. They emphasized Mrs. Forsythe's despair about her son's future. She spoke to Lois as though she knew there was no possible chance of her recovery.
"You see, my dear," she said, in her soft, complaining voice, which sometimes dropped to a whisper, "he has no aunts or uncles to look after him when I am gone; no one to be good to him and help him to be good. Not that he is wild or foolish, Lois, like some young men, but he's full of spirit, and he needs a good home. Oh, what will he do without me. He has no one to take care of him!"
Lois was too crushed by misery to feel even a gleam of humor, when the thought flashed through her mind that she might offer to take his mother's place; but she knew enough not to express it.
"Oh," Mrs. Forsythe continued, "if he were only married to some sweet girl that I knew and loved how happy I should be, how content!"