"Give him hope," she said, with intensity. "For weeks--months--he has never allowed himself a moment's hope."
The doctor reflected.
"We will do what we can," he said, slowly. "Meanwhile, cheerfulness!--all the cheerfulness possible."
Diana's faint, obedient smile, as she rose to leave the room, touched him afresh. Just married, he understood. These are the things that women do!
As he opened the door for her he said, with some hesitation: "You have, perhaps, heard of some of the curious effects that a railway collision produces. A man who has been in a collision and received a blow suffers afterward great pain, loss of walking power, impairment of vision, and so forth. The man's suffering is real--the man himself perfectly sincere--his doctor diagnoses incurable injury--the jury awards him damages. Yet, in a certain number of instances, the man recovers. Have we here an aggravated form of the same thing? Ah, madame, courage!"
For in the doorway he saw her fall back against the lintel for support. The hope that he infused tested her physically more severely than the agonies of the preceding weeks. But almost immediately she controlled herself, smiled at him again, and went.
That night various changes were made at Tallyn. Diana's maid unpacked, in the room communicating with Marsham's; and Diana, pale and composed, made a new arrangement with Oliver's male nurse. She was to take the nursing of the first part of the night, and he was to relieve her at three in the morning. To her would fall the administration of the new medicine.
At eleven o'clock all was still in the house. Diana opened the door of Oliver's room with a beating heart. She wore a dressing-gown of some white stuff; her black hair, released from the combs of the day, was loosely rolled up, and curled round her neck and temples. She came in with a gentle deliberate step; it was but a few hours since the ceremony of the morning, but the tranformation in her was instinctive and complete. To-night she was the wife--alone with her husband.
She saw that he was not asleep, and she went and knelt down beside him.