"The nurse and physician will both do their duty more faithfully if I am here to watch them," Vane answered, inflexibly. "For her sake," he added, in a low tone, and with white lips, "I shall do my utmost to bring him back to health, while if, in spite of all, he dies, I shall lay him by her side, and then take up the broken thread of my own life as best I can."
Lady Cameron stole to his side and wound her arms about his neck.
"Vane," she murmured, while tears streamed over her cheeks, "my noble boy! it is like you to do this and like the Master who said, 'I was a stranger and ye took me in.' But it breaks my heart to hear you speak in that hopeless tone. I know—I feel sure that the 'broken thread of your life,' as you express it, will be joined again. I cannot contemplate with resignation that you, with your noble character and grand possibilities for doing good, should carry this unhealed wound to your grave. But I shall not go home to leave you here," she added, resolutely; "if you stay to care for this poor, suffering stranger, I shall stay to look after you."
"Mother, I cannot permit it," Vane began, but she interrupted him.
"I am inexorable," she said, firmly. "You know that the warm weather is not depressing to me, as to most people, and anxiety would prey upon me more than the climate, so it will be useless to urge me further."
Thus it was settled, and those two royal-hearted people remained for another month in that deserted hotel, and devoted themselves to the care of Wallace Richardson during his critical illness.
He was very, very ill, but as the physician had said, possessed a splendid constitution, and, after a fierce battle with disease, he began slowly to recover—at least his physical health.
But his mind seemed sadly clouded, a condition caused by the pressure of a clot of blood upon his brain, the doctor said, and time alone would show whether he would ever entirely regain the use of his mental faculties; absorption was the only process by which it could be achieved, and this might be slow or rapid, as his general health improved.
At the end of four weeks it was thought that he might safely be moved; indeed, the physician advised it, thinking he would gain strength faster in a more invigorating atmosphere, and Vane determined to convey him directly to the Isle of Wight, whither he had intended taking Violet.
It seemed almost like the mockery of fate that, instead of taking the woman whom he had loved and hoped to make his wife to this beautiful summer home, he should remove hither the man whom she had loved and secretly married, to nurse him back to health.