In the revulsion of feeling which the words gave, Maria forgot her caution. “He is not dead, then?” she exclaimed, all too eagerly, her face turning to a glowing crimson, her lips apart with emotion.
Mr. Snow gathered in the signs, and a grave expression stole over his lips. But the next minute he was smiling openly. “No, he is not dead yet, Miss Maria; and we must see what we can do towards keeping him alive.” Maria turned home again with a beating and a thankful heart.
A weary, weary summer for George Godolphin—a weary, weary illness. It was more than two months before he rose from his bed at all, and it was nearly two more before he went down the stairs of the dwelling-house. A fine, balmy day it was, that one in June, when George left his bed for the first time, and was put in the easy-chair, wrapped up in blankets. The sky was blue, the sun was warm, and bees and butterflies sported in the summer air. George turned his weary eyes, weary with pain and weakness, towards the cheering signs of outdoor life, and wondered whether he should ever be abroad again.
It was August before that time came. Early in that month the close carriage of Ashlydyat waited at the door, to give Mr. George his first airing. A shadowy object he looked, Mr. Snow on one side of him, Margery on the other; Janet, who would be his companion in the drive, following. They got him downstairs between them, and into the carriage. From that time his recovery, though slow, was progressive, and in another week he was removed for change to Ashlydyat. He could walk abroad then with two sticks, or with a stick and somebody’s arm. George, who was getting up his spirits wonderfully, declared that he and his sticks should be made into a picture and sent to the next exhibition of native artists.
One morning, he and his sticks were sunning themselves in the porch at Ashlydyat, when a stranger approached and accosted him. A gentlemanly-looking man, in a straw hat, with a light travelling overcoat thrown upon his arm. George looked a gentleman also, in spite of his dilapidated health and his sticks, and the stranger raised his hat with something of foreign urbanity.
“Does Mr. Verrall reside here?”
“No,” replied George.
A hard, defiant sort of expression rose immediately to the stranger’s face. It almost seemed to imply that George was deceiving him: and his next words bore out the impression. “I have been informed that he does reside here,” he said, with a stress upon the “does.”
“He did reside here,” replied George Godolphin: “but he does so no longer. That is where Mr. Verrall lives,” he added, pointing one of his sticks at the white walls of Lady Godolphin’s Folly.
The stranger wheeled round on his heel, took a survey of it, and then lifted his hat again, apparently satisfied. “Thank you, sir,” he said. “The mistake was mine. Good morning.”