"Lionel, am I dying?"
Quietly as the words were spoken, they struck on his ear with startling intensity. He rose then and pushed her hair from her damp brow with a fond hand, murmuring some general inquiry as to how she felt.
"Am I dying?" came again from the panting lips.
What was he to answer her? To say that she was dying might send her into a paroxysm of terror; to deceive her in that awful hour by telling her she was not, went against every feeling of his heart.
"But I don't want to die," she urged, in some excitement, interpreting his silence to mean the worst. "Can't Jan do anything for me? Can't Dr. Hayes?"
"Dr. Hayes will be here soon," observed Lionel soothingly, if somewhat evasively. "He will come by the next train."
She took his hand, held it between hers, and looked beseechingly up to his face. "I don't want to leave you," she whispered. "Oh, Lionel! keep me here if you can! You know you are always kind to me. Sometimes I have reproached you that you were not, but it was not true. You have been ever kind, have you not?"
"I have ever striven to be so," he answered, the tears glistening on his eyelashes.
"I don't want to die. I want to get well and go about again, as I used to do when at Verner's Pride. Now Sir Edmund Hautley is come home, that will be a good place to visit at. Lionel, I don't want to die! Can't you keep me in life?"
"If by sacrificing my own life, I could save yours, Heaven knows how willingly I would do it," he tenderly answered.