“I would have come to see you had I known you wished it,” he answered. “But you do not look strong enough to receive visitors.”
“They might cure me, if they would,” she continued, panting for breath. “I want to go away somewhere, and that Snow won’t let me. If it were Ethel, he would take care to cure her.”
“He will let you go as soon as you are equal to it, I am sure,” said Thomas Godolphin.
“Why should the fever have come to me at all?—Why couldn’t it have gone to Ethel instead? She’s strong. She would have got well in no time. It’s not fair——”
“My dear child, my dear, dear child, you must not excite yourself,” implored Lady Sarah, abruptly interrupting her.
“I shall speak,” cried Sarah Anne, with a touch, feeble though it was, of her old peevish vehemence. “Nobody’s thought of but Ethel. If you had had your way,” looking hard at Mr. Godolphin, “she wouldn’t have been allowed to come near me; no, not if I had died.”
Her mood changed to tears. Lady Sarah whispered to him to leave the room: it would not do, this excitement. Thomas wondered why he had been brought to it. “I will come and see you again when you are better,” he soothingly whispered.
“No you won’t,” sobbed Sarah Anne. “You are going to Scotland, and I shall be dead when you come back. I don’t want to die. Why do they frighten me with their prayers? Good-bye, Thomas Godolphin.”
The last words were called after him; when he had taken his leave of her and was quitting the room. Lady Sarah attended him to the threshold: her eyes full, her hands lifted. “You may see that there’s no hope of her!” she wailed.
Thomas did not think there was the slightest hope. To his eye—though it was not so practised an eye in sickness as Mr. Snow’s, or even as that of the Rector of All Souls’—it appeared that in a very few days, perhaps hours, hope for Sarah Anne Grame would be over for ever.