"Gone to her room, and her brother-in-law is married. It was marked in a paper, and I read it to her, and she's sick," Pauline said, without, however, in the least connecting the sickness with the marriage.
Daisy did not come down to dinner that night, and the maid who called her the next morning reported her as ill and acting very strangely. Through the summer a malarious fever had prevailed to some extent in and about Rouen, and the physician whom Madame Lafarcade summoned to the sick girl expressed a fear that she was coming down with it, and ordered her kept as quiet as possible.
"She seems to have something weighing on her mind. Has she heard any bad news from home?" he asked, as in reply to his question where her pain was the worst, Daisy always answered:
"It reached him too late—too late, and I am so sorry."
Madame knew of no bad news, she said, and then as she saw the foreign paper lying on the table, she took it up, and, guided by the pencil marks, read the notice of Guy Thornton's marriage, and that gave her the key at once to Daisy's mental agitation. Daisy had been frank with her and told as much of her story as was necessary, and she knew that the Guy Thornton married to Julia Hamilton had once called Daisy his wife.
"Excuse me, she is, or she has something on her mind, I suspect," she said to the physician, who was still holding Daisy's hand and looking anxiously at her flushed cheeks and bright, restless eyes.
"I thought so," he rejoined, "and it aggravates all the symptoms of her fever. I shall call again to-night."
He did call, and found his patient worse, and the next day he asked of Madame Lafarcade:
"Has she friends in this country? If so, they ought to know."
A few hours later and in his lodgings at Berlin, Tom read the following dispatch: