But it was a difficult task for her to hope to reach that heart, incrusted as it was with worldliness, selfishness, and hardness—a real Chinese puzzle to Serena—but, with a zeal worthy of a better cause, she kept on in the road which she had marked out for herself.
She had succeeded in making her presence indispensable to Bernard Dane. He had long since learned to rely upon her, and to look to her for advice and comfort, to soothe his sufferings and to cheer and console him in his dreary moments. In short, she had, with the greatest tact and skill, made herself a regular sunbeam in the darksome sick-chamber, a ray of sunlight to brighten the old man's gloom; and more than all—a sure road to the heart of a man—she had made herself a household necessity.
Just when she had succeeded in making herself indispensable to Bernard Dane, just when he grew to expect her coming to cheer his dreary sick-room, when he began to rely upon her as a watcher, a gentle, tireless nurse—Serena was a born nurse—when he had begun to believe that there was no comfort in the whole world for him which Serena's hand could not bestow, when he had come to a stage where he would miss the caressing touch of her gentle hands bathing his brow and arranging his pillow, the voice which had lost its shrill tones and now spoke only in a low, sweet way, when he, in short, had begun to look to Serena for every comfort, then—then came a blank, a dull, dreary blank, for Serena suddenly disappeared. And when the old man in querulous tones demanded of his housekeeper the cause of her absence, Mrs. Graves informed him that Serena, worn out with watching and nursing, was very ill and confined to her own room.
[CHAPTER XXVI.]
A WELL LAID PLOT.
Two or three days dragged by. They seemed to poor old Bernard Dane, lying upon his bed of suffering, to really drag, they were so long and uneventful. Every morning the first question asked Mrs. Graves was: "How is Serena?" And Mrs. Graves would wisely stifle her righteous wrath and answer quietly:
"About the same, sir."
The old man's anxiety as well as loneliness grew and flourished. It would have retarded his recovery but that he became suddenly possessed with a determination to get well, and as his illness had really been more due to sorrow and remorse than to any bodily ailment, he was soon able to sit up and at last, wrapped in a dressing-gown, reclined upon a sofa in his large, cheerful room. He took care to send friendly messages to Serena every day, and eagerly waited for the time when she would be able to return to him. It was true, strange as it may appear, that old Bernard Dane, wise and astute, clever and shrewd, had actually fallen in love with shrewish, plain-faced Serena Lynne.