His mother leaned over him, stroking his hair from his forehead. He met her eyes gravely.
The late sunlight sifted through the drawn curtains and touched the flowers; their exquisite odor crept through the stillness of the room as the sweet memory of an old song steals through the silent chambers of the heart.
"I love her," he said simply. "I have loved her always," he said, still looking into her eyes.
She smiled.
"I have known it always," she answered.
But the four days lengthened into four weeks before he saw Cary. That night the half healed wound reopened, and he had a sinking spell.
The next morning before the news had had time to become generally known, Trevelyan mysteriously appeared at the house on Grosvenor Square, and went straight to Stewart's room.
"You go and lie down," he said briefly to his aunt, who had been up all night, "I guess I ought to know how to take care of him. I did it once before in India. I won't leave you until I've pulled him through."
And then Trevelyan and Death fought it out again, and Trevelyan beat back the Shadowy Presence in the great still London house, as he had done weeks before in the government hospital in India. He hardly left the sick room, and he seemed scarcely ever to sleep. He would sit for hours at a time, his finger on Stewart's pulse; quieting his ravings and forcing back the fever by the might of his own will.
Except in the dim sick room where Stewart lived again in delirium the night of the perilous ride, over the great Grosvenor Square house rested the hush of grave sickness and impending death. The servant stationed at the door, guarded against the possible ringing of the muffled bell, and answered inquiries, and received the cards left, and the offerings of flowers. None ever reached Stewart's darkened room except the small bunch of violets that came daily, and which his mother would bring up and place on the table by his bed, hoping in woman-fashion that the perfume might attract and hold his wandering faculties, or arouse him from the stupor into which he would fall from time to time; but it never did. If she had ever dreamed of the exquisite torture the flowers and their scent were to Trevelyan, she would have placed them with the others down stairs, but Trevelyan never told, and she never knew the moments in which the perfume seemed to drive him mad.