Lawrence sank down on the bench, but he caught at the girl's skirt, saying, breathlessly:
"Stay! Stay! Read this."
The letter fluttered out towards her. She stopped, standing perfectly still. She recognized her cousin's writing, and her eyes darted over the lines, not reading much, but taking in, as by a flash of lurid light, the whole sense of the base epistle. She did not speak, but stood gazing down at the letter after she had ceased to read it. She did not wish to look in her companion's face; she felt that she could not. Her own cheeks were hot with humiliated indignation.
Lawrence had leaned his elbows on his knees and covered his face with his hands. He was not thinking; he was not even feeling. A dull sensation of sinking down—down, he knew not where, was all that he was conscious of. Then some keen stab, as if from a hot knife, went through him. He started up, turning his face towards Carolyn. He flung out his hands as if he were groping blindly.
"Oh, Caro, my love!" he cried, not knowing what he said.
Then he fell forward on the ground at her feet.
The climax of illness and anxiety and unhappiness seemed to have been reached. The inanimate body was taken to the room which had always been Lawrence's, and put upon his old bed.
Then followed days and weeks of illness, during which the man was sometimes delirious, sometimes lying in a stupor.
A nurse and Mrs. Ffolliott and Carolyn watched over him.
At last, when summer had waned towards its end, and there were already hints of the autumn glories, Lawrence opened his eyes and saw Mrs. Ffolliott sitting by him.