"Oh, what matters honour; what matters anything in comparison with his precious life!" she cried, with streaming eyes. "Tell him, Lucy,—perhaps he will understand you—that he shall indeed marry you if he will but set his mind at rest, and get well; he shall never again see Miss Fauntleroy. Lucy! are there no means of calming him? If this terrible excitement lasts, it will kill him. Tell him it is you he shall marry, not Barbara Fauntleroy."
"I cannot tell him so," said Lucy, from the very depth of her aching heart. "It would not be right to deceive him, even now. There can be no escape, if he lives, from the marriage with Miss Fauntleroy."
A few more hours, and the crisis came. The handsome, the intelligent, the refined Travice Arkell, lay still, in a lethargy that was taken to be that of death. It went forth to Westerbury that he was dead; and Lucy took her last look at him, and walked home with her aunt Mildred—to a home, which, however well supplied it was now with the world's comforts, could only seem to her one of desolation. Lucy Arkell's eyes were dry; dry with that intensity of anguish that admits not of tears, and her brain seemed little less confused than his had done, in these last few days of life.
Mildred sat down in her home, and seemed to see into the future. She saw herself and her niece living on in their quiet and monotonous home; her own form drooping with the weight of years, Lucy's approaching middle life. "The old maids" they would be slightingly termed by those who knew little indeed of their inward history. And in their lonely hearts, enshrined in its most hidden depths, the image that respectively filled each in early life, the father and son, William and Travice Arkell, never, never replaced by any other, but holding their own there so long as time should last.
Seated by her fire on that desolate night, she saw it as in a vision.
CHAPTER XVI.
MISS FAUNTLEROY LOVED AT LAST.
But Travice Arkell did not die. The lethargy that was thought to be death proved to be only the exhaustion of spent nature. When the first faint indications of his awaking from it appeared, the physicians said it was possible that he might recover. He lay for some days in a critical state, hopes and fears about equally balancing, and then he began to get visibly stronger.
"I have been nearly dead, have I not?" he asked one day of his father, who was sitting by the bed.