“I,” Fred answered her, “Fred Lansing. Don’t you know me?”
“I don’t quite think I do,” she said, with her eyes still fixed upon him. “You seem a little like Herbert. I knew him long ago, in the woods and on the river, and everywhere. But that is all over, and I gave him back the ring, which I never wore, for fear of his father, you know.”
“Yes, I know,” Fred said, taking the hot hands which were beating the air. “I know; and, Louie, don’t be troubled about those debts. I will pay them all if you never can. Be quiet now and get well.”
“Yes, get well, so as to sing. That’s what I must do; and I am so tired, and the keys in my throat are all out of tune. Listen,” and she tried a few notes of her famous bird-song on which so much depended.
At first her voice was clear as a canary’s, and some like it, and then it broke and died away in a faint, gurgling sound pitiful to hear.
“What a discord!” she said, with a laugh which was half a cry; “and hark! how the people hiss and jeer, when I expected applause. I can’t do it. I can’t.”
This was her cry many times a day, as she tried to sing, and always broke down with the sobbing words, “I can’t, I can’t! There is something choking me, and they hiss me so for my father. I didn’t know it. I was not to blame, and he was so sorry for it all.”
At last the effort to sing ceased, and she was so still that the stillness was worse than the singing; it was so much like death, as she lay with her eyes closed, and the hands which had beaten the air so restlessly lying just where they were put, with no appearance of life in them.
It was better so, the doctor said, as she was not wearing her strength away. She was young. She had strong recuperative powers, and would recover with close care and nursing.
There was no lack of these. The best nurses London could afford were called to her aid, while either Miss Percy, or Fred, or his mother, who had joined them, was with her constantly. Fred’s voice she always knew, and it was Fred who, when she seemed drifting far out on the tide which has no turning, brought her back to a semblance of life and consciousness.