“Uncle,” she began, when he obeyed the summons, “I have had a great shock to-night, and I fear I am going to have a bad illness. Count that,” and she laid his fingers on her pulse; “promise me that if I should be delirious you will get a nurse from London. I do not want Helen nor any of the servants to come near me, and, beyond everything, keep Miss Derno away.”
Whereupon Mr. Aggland went downstairs, and sending off straightway for a doctor, told Miss Derno he thought Phemie must be “lightheaded;” acting upon which information, Miss Derno went upstairs, and knocked at Mrs. Stondon’s door, which was opened by Mrs. Stondon’s maid, who said her mistress had gone to bed with a bad headache.
“Is that Miss Derno?” cried out Phemie; “let her come in—I wish to speak to her; and you may go away, Marshall. Are you there?” she exclaimed, as the door closed behind the woman. “Come near to me. That will do. Now then, what do you want?”
“I want to know how you are, dear,” said Miss Derno, approaching the bed, and trying to take one of Phemie’s hands in hers, but Phemie pulled it away.
“I will be fair and frank with you, Miss Derno,” she began; “I will speak freely to you now, as I once thought never to speak freely to mortal. Within the last few hours I have learnt all; I have learned who sent Basil Stondon to India; who told my husband that I—that he——”
“That Basil loved you,” supplied Miss Derno, “If you mean that, I certainly plead guilty; but, Mrs. Stondon, was I wrong?”
“Wrong or right what business had you to come between my husband and me?” retorted Phemie, sitting bolt upright in bed; while the loosened waves of her hair, that she wore ordinarily braided so closely under her cap, rippled down over throat and shoulders and pillows. “Could you not have left me to deal with Basil without breaking the heart of as good a man as ever possessed an unworthy wife?”
“I never told Captain Stondon that I thought you loved Basil,” was the reply.
“But you sent him where he could hear it for himself,” answered Phemie. “You told him to go to the pine plantation that night when Basil and I parted.”
Here Mrs. Stondon stopped: there seemed to come around her as she spoke the twilight of the autumn evening, the moaning of the wind, the leaves beneath her feet. She could not go on, and so she paused, while Miss Derno said—