A great spat of blood he had not observed stained his spotless linen cuff; she turned dead white as she saw it.
"It is nothing," he answers, with his handkerchief at his lips, but he draws it away dashed with minute streaks of blood; "sit down, mother, dear, don't get nervous, don't get excited."
She is leaning over his chair, her arm around his shoulder, her eyes full of piteous mother's love and fear fixed on his pale face.
"My son, what does it mean?"
"Mother, nothing much. I have only had a slight hemorrhage from the lungs—from over-exertion, I presume. It is all over now; but to make all sure I will consult Doctor Constant to-morrow, and I will be more careful of my health and strength hereafter, I promise you."
"Oh, I knew you were killing yourself," she wailed; "I knew it!"
"Don't, mother—don't talk so wildly. It was for the best, I assure you; it had to come. I shall be very much better after this; Doctor Constant will tell you so," he says, tenderly, to the wild-eyed mother, who is white with fear for her boy, and with all a woman's physical horror at the sight of blood.
She glances around her vacantly, then suddenly walks across the room, lifting the towel from the wash-basin. She looks with reeling brain and dazed eyes on that scarlet tide, and turns on her son a look of awful horror and anguish—such anguish as a mother's heart can feel—down, down, down in its fathomless, illimitable depths. He comes forth and steadies her reeling form with his one arm about her waist, looking down at her with those earnest, beautiful gray eyes.
"Oh, mother, don't look so—don't grieve so! I tell you, certainly, I shall be better after this. I have only lost a little blood. Cheer up, little mother. Doctor Constant shall give me a tonic, and make it all right. You won't tell Mrs. Winans? I would rather she did not know. She would worry over it, too, and there is nothing to alarm either of your tender hearts."
He did get better of it, though Doctor Constant shook his head warningly when he met him still at his labors in the hospital. Grace knew nothing of it, by his wish, and in February a letter from Lulu, who had spent a portion of the winter in Italy, filled Mrs. Clendenon with the same perplexities, doubts, and hopes that agitated Lulu's heart in her far away home in London, which, with its foggy atmosphere and chilly rains, made itself peculiarly disagreeable to the young American lady who pined for the clear, pure atmosphere and health-giving sea-breeze of her own native home, while she gently deferred to the wishes of her husband and his aunt, and remained abroad until it pleased them to turn their faces homeward.