[THE TWO PATIENTS.]
Day followed day in Chester Square, bringing slowly, almost imperceptibly, health and strength back to the exquisite form of Edith Grace. The spirituality lent by illness still more refined the delicate beauty of the girl, and when the colour came back to the lips, and the cheeks lost their pallor she seemed more like a being new-born of heaven to earth than a mortal of our homely race.
At the end of a week she was still restricted to her room, although allowed to sit up. The fear was not so much of physical weakness as of mental excitement. There was now no need to watch her by night. She seemed in perfect health, in that cool seraphic health of man before the Fall.
And what a change had taken place in the young girl's spirit! Her grandmother had told her that Mrs. Hanbury had insisted on making good the loss they had sustained in the failure of the bank, and more beside.
"I am very rich," said Mrs. Hanbury, "for a woman, I have only a life interest in most of the money my late husband left, and on my death it all goes to John. But I have never spent anything like my income, and John has an income of his own since he came of age. It is not that I will listen to no refusal, but I will hear no objection. I put it to you in this way: Do you suppose if my husband were making his will at this moment and knew of the misfortune which had come upon you and the child, he would insert no provision for you in his will? And do you mean to say that I am to have no regard to what I know would be his wish if he were alive? Remember, you represent the English side of his house. The child is the last of the English side, as John is the last of the Polish side. So let me hear no more of the matter. John has a sufficient income. I have large savings with which I do nothing. Am I to give my savings to an hospital or a charity or to the people of my husband, who left the money?"
Then Mrs. Grace told Edith that Mrs. Hanbury had taken a great liking to her.
"She always calls you 'the child' when she speaks of you, and indeed it seems to me she cares for you nearly as much as if you were her own daughter. She told me she never had a sister or a daughter, and that she barely remembers her own mother, and that all her married life she prayed for a girl-baby, but it was not given to her. And now that she has found you, dear, and me, she says she is not going to be lonely for womenfolk ever again, for although we are not of her own blood we are of John's, and we are the nearest people in the world to her except her brother, Sir Edward Preston. She says she has a right to us, that she found us, and means to insist upon her right by keeping us to herself."
And all this helped to make the quiet greater in the girl and helped to heal her.
Then the old woman told Edith that Mrs. Hanbury wondered if she were like that Grace of more than a hundred years back. She said this at dinner one day, and there and then Mr. Hanbury conceived the notion of trying to find out if, in that great portrait-painting age, any portrait had been painted of the beautiful Kate Grace who had fascinated the king. Mrs. Grace always spoke of Poniatowski as though he were a king while he lived in England in the days of George II.
The young man hunted all London to find out a portrait, and behold in one of the great houses within a mile of where she lay, a house at which Mr. Hanbury had often visited, was a portrait of "Mrs. Hanbury and child," believed to be one of the Hanbury-Williams family. Mr. John Hanbury had gone to see the portrait, and came back saying one would fancy it was a portrait of Edy herself, only it was not nearly so beautiful as Edy.