Doctor Franks comes, eager, and on the alert, smiling a little as Reine's curious eyes seek his face.
"Another stranger," she complains, with almost childish petulance.
"Well, and what would you have?" he answers, cheerfully, as he touches her pulse. "Though strangers, we are all friends."
"I want Vane," the girl answers, with a hungry yearning in her weak voice.
"After awhile—after awhile," he answers, evasively, as the lady had done. "Are you feeling better to-day?"
"Yes, if I have been ill—have I?" Reine inquires, with some of her old sharpness of tone, for in her weak state she is easily irritated.
"Have you? Well, I should say so," he responds, smilingly. "At present you are nothing but a pair of big black eyes and a lot of hair that I should have cut off only that you were so pretty with it that I hadn't the heart."
"Do not believe him," Mrs. Odell puts in, good-naturedly. "If I had not scolded and begged, and almost gone down on my knees to him, he would have shaved your pretty head bare."
"I should not have liked that," Reine says, putting her small fingers to the thick, glossy plaits. "Vane liked my hair. He thought it pretty; he said so that very night when——" But, with the effort of recalling the long-past time, a great wave of memory suddenly breaks over Reine's heart. Her wan face grows paler, her eyes dilate wildly and fill with swift, passionate tears.