Medway said he would consider it. Dinner went off gaily with stories and badinage. Afterwards the traveller from the Colonial came in, and then the violinist. He played for them—played rhapsodies and fantasias. It was after eleven when the three guests departed. Greer's gay voice could be heard down the street—
"'A Saint-Blaise, à la Zuecca,
Vous étiez, vous étiez bien aise
A Saint-Blaise.
A Saint Blaise, à la Zuecca
Nous étions bien là—'"
Thomson appeared, with Mahomet behind him to put out the lights.
"Good-night—sleep right!" said Medway. "Pleasant fellows, aren't they?"
Toward daylight she was awakened by a knock at her door, followed by Thomson's voice. "Mr. Ashendyne has had some kind of a stroke, Miss Hagar—" She sprang up, threw on a kimono, opened the door, and ran downstairs with Thomson. "I heard him breathing heavily—I've waked Mahomet and sent the black boy for the doctor—"
It was paralysis. And after months of Nassau, she took him back to the mainland and northward by slow stages, not to Gilead Balm, for he made always "No!" with his head and eyes to that, and not to New York for he seemed impatient of that, too; but at last to Washington. There she and Thomson found a pleasant residence to let on a tree-embowered avenue, and there they moved him, and there she stayed with him two years and read a vast number of books aloud, and between the readings cultivated a sunny talkativeness. At the end of the two years there came a second stroke which killed him.