The doctor was a man who had studied humanity as well as physic.
“I think so,” he answered; “there is room for hope. Every day gained brings us nearer to it. If once she sleeps, sleeps naturally, I think—she is saved.” He hesitated, and Frank, hanging on his words, pressed him further.
“She will wake to reason—to mental restfulness?”
He was a man; he had heard his patient in her delirium. She had a history, this beautiful young woman who called herself Mrs. Orme, and over whom Lord Francis Onslow watched with such care. She had a history, but he did not know it—did not seek to know it. No idle curiosity prompted his question. But if she woke, and woke to trouble, then—then he could not answer for the consequences.
“Will you let me tell you?” Before Dr. Fairfax could say “Yes,” or “No,” Frank had dragged him back into the room, and was pouring out incoherently, quickly, the whole miserable story; their courtship, their married life, their bickerings, and the interference of relatives, their separation, his jealousy, the murder that even now he could not account for or remember—everything, everything.
The doctor listened, grave, sympathetic. Frank paused breathlessly.
“She has a child, you say—a little child? Did she care for that, did she love it?”
“She worships him as (fool that I have been not to have seen it) only a good woman could love her child.” Frank’s jealousy was dead forever.
“Then bring her child here. Let her wake amid her natural surroundings—her husband by her side, her child’s voice ringing in her ears, the life of the ‘home’ about her. Let the past be forgotten by her. Let peace be her healing, and love her medicine. You will be her doctor, not I, when there is recognition in her eyes, and she is struggling back to a world that has been so cruel to her.”
He took up his hat. He had spoken. They must wait the hour.