LORD ASHDEN spent that night pacing restlessly up and down the floor, and when the doctor came out of the sick-chamber early the following morning, he called him into his room. “I want to know,” he began in a strange, monotonous voice, “just what the chances are for the boy’s life. No, don’t try to spare me, please. I prefer to know the truth.”
The physician, a strictly professional and apparently unsympathetic man, was moved to sudden pity as he remarked the traces of intense suffering in Lord Ashden’s face and manner:
“My dear fellow,” he said, an expression in his eyes which was most unusual to them, “I did not know the little chap was so dear to you.”
“He is all I have,” said Lord Ashden quietly. “All I have,” he repeated as though to himself, and then he went on:
“But you have not told me yet what you think of his condition.”
It was the strictly professional man who spoke this time.
“It is difficult to tell—just yet,” he said. “The burns are serious, although not necessarily fatal, and there has been a great shock to the general system, a very great shock; the action of the heart is weak, and there is a deplorable lack of vitality and less recuperative energy than I could wish to see. However”—He paused and looked at Lord Ashden steadily.
“Go on,” he said almost sternly, and, taking up the physician’s sentence, he added, “you have, in short, little encouragement to offer?”
“I think,” said the doctor slowly, “that the boy’s chances are about even; yes, about even,” he repeated, and then he held out his hand.
“I must go now,” he said, “but I will return in a few hours. And be assured, my dear sir, that everything possible will be done.”