The plan was carried out, and by Berry’s wish they made their little home in London, for she was tired, she said, of the foreign lingo she couldn’t understand, and wanted to stay among people who spoke her mother tongue.
So they came from France and Italy, where they had passed the winter months, to London, where, in a comfortable but not luxurious suite of rooms, with a buxom maid of all work, they lived quietly and happily until May. Berenice devoted her time of seclusion in studying the languages under the tutorship of Charley, who was quite proficient in that line.
Thus quietly and happily they waited an event that was to crown their wedded lives with happiness.
Alas! fortune frowned on their springing hopes. Their little baby died, soon after birth, and was laid tenderly away in a wee green grave. But for over six weeks, a battle of physicians went on, with grim death in the foreground, trying to snatch Berry from their fostering care.
Never till now did Charley Bonair realize the depth and strength of his love for his precious wife. Sharing the vigils of the doctors and nurses with ceaseless care, he grew to feel to his heart’s core all that she was to him, and knew that if she died, life would be unendurable to him forever after.
Oh, what joy when the wavering balance of life and death dropped her into her husband’s arms again, with the chances in her favor for recovery!
While she lay so ill, he had learned to pray, this man who had almost forgotten his God, and now he sent up a prayer of thanksgiving for her restoration.
While she was slowly convalescing, the head physician ordered that Mrs. Bonair should be taken, as soon as she was able to be moved, down to the sea, naming an obscure and rude little fishing village on the coast of Cornwall as the preferred situation.
“She will have absolute calm and quiet there, and it is very essential to her shattered nerves and frail condition of health,” he said.
“We shall be buried alive,” Charley said grimly to his wife when he took her there, but she answered, with her usual sunny good nature: