But her piteous request was forgotten for a time, for before night her life was in danger.
Hour after hour the desolate young creature looked death in the face and found him terrible, and called out in her agony that she was afraid to die unless Hugh would hold her hand; and for many a long day after that Fay did not see her baby boy, for the least excitement would kill her, the doctor said, and her only chance was perfect quiet.
And the urgent letters that were sent did not reach Sir Hugh for a long time, for he was wandering about Switzerland. He had carelessly altered his route, and had forgotten to tell Fay so.
But on his homeward route, which was not until the six weeks were past, he found a budget awaiting him at Interlachen.
Hugh was deeply shocked when he heard of his wife’s danger, and blamed himself for his selfishness in leaving her.
The trip had refreshed him, but the idea of returning home was still irksome to him. He had enjoyed his freedom from domestic restraint; and he had planned a longer route, that should end in the Pyramids, when Fay was well and strong again. It would not matter then; but he was a brute, he confessed, to have left her just at that time. Then he added in self-extenuation that he was not quite himself.
And one lovely summer morning, when Fay lay like a broken lily on her pillow, and looked languidly out upon the world and life, they brought her baby to her and laid it in her weak arms; and Fay gazed wonderingly into a dimpled, tiny face and blue-gray eyes that seemed to her the counterpart of Hugh’s eyes; and then, as she felt the soft breathing of the warm, nestling thing against her shoulder, and saw the crumpled hand on her breast, a new, strange flood of happiness came into her starved heart.
“Hugh’s little boy,” she whispered, and a tender look shone in her eyes; and then she added, “he will love me for my baby’s sake.”
And she was very happy in her belief.
As long as they would let her, she lay cradling her boy in her feeble arms and whispering to him about his father: and when night came she would lie awake happily trying to hear baby’s soft breathing in the bassinet beside her, and if he woke and cried, she would ask the nurse to lay him beside her.