“You will soon know,” said Inversay, whose voice was choked in his throat as he looked at the handsome child with the soft black eyes, so like the eyes of another boy of the same age who, twenty years or so before this day, had run beside him over the sunny lawns of his old home; the old home was mortgaged to its last sod, and the boy had come home in the flower of his manhood to die—ruined by a woman.
They were driven quickly to the door of a well-known hotel; Inversay begged the tutor to wait below in the reading-room, and went alone upstairs with Jack, who caught his breath and felt his heart quake a little.
A vague terror had seized him; he recalled all the papers had said of the fighting in Loomalia.
Was it, perhaps——? The child’s warm blood turned cold.
Before the closed door of a bedroom Inversay paused.
“It is someone you like who is very ill,” he said in a broken voice. “Don’t be frightened and don’t cry out, for heaven’s sake.”
He opened the door and motioned to the boy to precede him and enter.
There were two bay windows in the chamber, they were open, and the light shone on to the bed where an emaciated form was lying, a hand wasted and bony lay on the coverlid, a face, which had a ghastly beauty in it, was like marble on the snow of the pillows; some women, his mother and sisters, were kneeling beside the bed.
“Harry!” cried the child with a shrill scream, and swift as the wind he sprang across the room and leaped on the bed and covered the cold still face with kisses.
“Oh, Harry, Harry, wake up!” he sobbed. “Oh, speak to me, Harry. Look at me. It’s Jack, it’s Jack, that’s here!”