Letitia went to her writing table when he was gone with a strange buoyancy. She had not written any letters for some time, but there was a sort of exultation in her now as if the end of her suspense was near. John came in when she had seated herself and begun her letter. He had missed the doctor and was anxious to hear what he had said. There was something in his wife’s aspect which startled him. “The boy is better?” he exclaimed. He gave her in the impulse of the moment a credit which she did not deserve.
“Is he?” cried Letitia, turning round upon her chair with all the color going out of her face. She added tremblingly, shrinking from her husband’s eye, “Do you mean that there is a change?”
“I thought so,” he said gravely, “from the relieved look in your face.”
They contemplated each other for a moment in silence, John with pain and distress, she shrinking a little from his eye. “I don’t know what you mean,” she said; “though I might be relieved to think that the poor child will not suffer much longer. I am to write to his mother, the doctor says.”
“To write to his mother! Then he has given up all hope?”
Letitia did not trust herself to speak, but she nodded her head in assent.
“Poor boy, poor boy!” cried John; “and poor Mary,” he added after a moment, with a broken voice.
“It will be nothing to her,” said Mrs. Parke briefly.
“God knows! it may rouse her to understand what she’s losing: the finest, promising boy, the most generous and patient——”
“Oh, John, I cannot put up with you!” cried Letitia, wild with agitation and excitement. “The one creature that stood between your son and his birthright—between you and everything you have looked for all your life.”