“No, we dare not,” was Mrs. Ralston’s reply, and Miss Hansford continued: “I wouldn’t, either. None of ’em know enough to go in when it rains. I tried ’em when Elithe was sick and shipped them all. Good nursing is what he wants, with maybe some herb tea. I wish I could see him.”
“You may,” Mrs. Ralston said. “Come to lunch with Elithe to-morrow. That will not excite suspicion. I have seen very few people, although many have called. Most of the visitors have left the island, and I am glad of that.”
Her invitation was accepted, and the next day both Miss Hansford and Elithe were admitted to the Smuggler’s room. But Paul did not know either of them. His fever and delirium had increased, and he was talking continually, not of the present but of the past, when he was a boy with Jack Percy, stealing Miss Hansford’s watermelon and playing he was a prisoner in the Smuggler’s room, with an officer at the door trying to get in. This was uppermost in his mind, and he begged that the officer should be kept out, saying: “I don’t know what they think I did. I only know I didn’t do it.”
The case was serious, and grew more and more so for three or four days, during which Miss Hansford expended all her nursing powers and knowledge, which were considerable, and Elithe staid by him constantly. He was more quiet with her, although he did not know her, and frequently called her Clarice, telling her he knew she would come, and once asking her to kiss him.
“Not now. You are too sick for that. You might give her the fever,” his mother interposed, while Elithe kept from his sight as far as possible.
He missed her at once and said: “If she can’t kiss me, she can hold my hand. Where is she?”
Elithe returned to her post and held his hot hands and bathed his head and answered to the name Clarice and felt her heart throb strangely at the terms of endearment he gave her, asking her often if she loved him. Her silence troubled him greatly, and he would look reproachfully at her, repeating the question, until once, when they were alone and he was very persistent, she leaned forwards and said in a whisper, while her cheeks were scarlet: “Yes, Paul, I love you. Don’t ask me again, or talk of me so much.”
“All right. I won’t,” he answered cheerfully, and soon fell into a sleep which did him so much good that from that time onward he began to mend.
“Will he remember?” Elithe asked herself in an agony of fear and shame as his brain began to clear and to realize where he was and why he was there.
He did not remember, nor did he mention Clarice again for some time, except to ask if she had been there.