“You know it was to have been mine in a week!”
Adam did not see the smile. He only heard the words, and his heart beat quickly as he thought it natural that Anna should wish to stay in what was to be her home.
The hot August sun came pouring into the small, low room she occupied, making it so uncomfortable, that Adam said she must be moved, and taking her in his arms he carried her down the stairs, and laid her upon the bridal bed, whose snowy drapery was scarcely whiter than was her face, save where the fever burned upon her fair skin. On the carpet where it had fallen he found the crumpled note. He knew it was her writing, and he looked curiously at the name upon it, while there stole over him a shadowy suspicion, as to the cause of Anna’s recent coldness.
“Herbert Dunallen!” He read the name with a shudder, and then thrust the note into his pocket until the young man came.
Oh, how he longed to read the note and know what his affianced bride had written to Dunallen; but not for the world would he have opened it, and Anna’s secret was safe, unless she betrayed it in her delirium, as she seemed likely to do.
A messenger had been dispatched to Castlewild, informing its young heir of Mildred Atherton’s mishap. In the room he called his library, Herbert sat, arranging his papers, and writing some directions for his head man of business.
“Something from Adam Floyd,” he exclaimed, as he tore open the envelope, “Oh, bother,” was all the comment he made, as he read the hastily written lines, which gave no hint of Anna’s sudden illness.
He was not in the least prepared for that, and the sudden paling of his cheek when, on his arrival at the cottage, he heard of it, did not escape the watchful Adam, who quietly handed him the note, explaining where he had found it, and then went back to Anna, in whose great blue eyes there was a look of fear whenever they met his—a look which added to the dull, heavy pain gnawing at his heart. He did not see Herbert when he read Anna’s note—did not hear his muttered curse at woman’s fickleness, but he saw the tiny fragments into which it was torn, flutter past the window where he sat by Anna’s side. One, a longer strip than the others, fell upon the window sill, and Adam picked it up, reading involuntarily the words “Your unhappy Anna.”
Down in the depths of Adam’s heart there was a sob, a moan of anguish as his fears were thus corroborated, but his face gave no token of the fierce pain within. It was just as calm as ever, when it turned again to Anna who was talking in her sleep, first of Herbert and then of Adam, begging him to forget that he ever knew the little girl called Anna Burroughs, or carried her over the rifts of snow to the school-house under the hill. It seemed strange that she should grow sick so fast when yesterday she had been comparatively well, but the sudden cold she had taken the previous night, added to the strong excitement under which she had been laboring, combined to spend the energies of a constitution never strong, and the fever increased so rapidly that before the close of the second day more than one heart throbbed with fear as to what the end would be.
In spite of her lame ankle Mildred had managed to get into the sick-room, urging Herbert to accompany her, and feeling greatly shocked at his reply that “camphor and medicine were not to his taste.”