"No, dear. Only a good angel, and you are she," he said, and kissed the hand below the gleaming bracelet.
"But I did not give you this. You got this yourself."
"No, you did not give me this money directly, but you gave me the means of getting it."
"But tell me all, dear. I am dying to hear."
"You must know, then, that in designing some machinery for preparing my fibre I hit upon an immense improvement in the scutching machine now in use. I patented my improvement, and sold my patent last evening for two hundred and fifty pounds."
She was overwhelmed with gratitude and joy. This was the first-fruit of his genius, the earnest of his great triumph.
For half-an-hour they sat and chatted, he telling her his schemes for the future, and she listening, full of delight and pride and love. Then he said he had some writing to do, and went to his room.
The fact was that he could hardly keep his eyes open. It had been a very hot night at the Counter Club, and he had come away the winner of close upon three hundred pounds. He locked the door, drew down the blind, threw himself on a couch, and was fast asleep in a few minutes.
Mrs. Crawford always breakfasted in her own room, and had her other meals brought to her in the drawing-room. She had gradually sunk back almost to the helpless condition in which she had lived so long before the fire. She suffered no pain, but she was nearly as helpless as a year ago. If necessity required it, she could creep about the room by resting her hands on the furniture, but as a rule she went from one place to the other by means of her invalid's chair. She never ventured down-stairs now. She lived upon the first-floor. Here were her bedroom, the drawing-room, her husband's study--which he called his own room--and the dressing-room where he slept, so as to be within call if she needed assistance in the night.
The doctors told Crawford that his wife was, if anything, rather worse than she had been before the fire, and that any other such shock would in all likelihood kill her.