“Have you not heard of his illness? Perhaps not, though: it has been so sudden. A few days ago he was apparently as well as I am now. But it was only last night that the doctors began to apprehend danger.”
“Is it fever?”
“Yes. A species of typhoid, I believe. Whether caught in his ministrations or not, I don’t know. Though I suppose it must have been. He is lying at his lodgings in Paradise Row. Leafchild has not seemed in good condition lately,” continued the clergyman. “He is most unremitting in his work, fags himself from morning till night, and lives anyhow: so perhaps he was not fortified to resist the attack of an enemy. He is very ill: and since last night he has been unconscious.”
“He is dangerously ill, did you say?” spoke poor Helen, biting her lips to hide their tremor.
“Almost more than dangerous: I fear there is little hope left,” he answered, never of course suspecting who Helen was. “Good-afternoon.”
She followed him with her eyes as he turned to the cloister-door: and then moved away towards the north entrance, looking as one dazed.
“Helen, where are you going?”
“To see him.”
“Oh, but it won’t do. It won’t, indeed, Helen.”
“I am going to see him,” she answered, in her most wilful tone. “Don’t you hear that he is dying? I know he is; I feel it instinctively as a sure and certain fact. If you have a spark of goodness you’ll come with me, Johnny Ludlow. It’s all the same—whether you do or not.”