"What man?" Hannah and her brother asked, simultaneously, a great fear in the heart of each lest the other had betrayed what Grey was not to know.
"Have you told him?" Burton whispered to his sister, who answered: "You know I have not." Then, turning to Grey, who was still looking at her, she said to him again: "What man?"
For a moment the wild, bright eyes regarded her fixedly; then there seemed to come over the boy a gleam of reason, and he replied: "I don't know."
After that he never mentioned the man again, or in any way alluded to the secret weighing so heavily upon the two who watched him so constantly--Hannah and his father. Not a word ever passed between them either on the subject, so anxious were they for the life of the lad, who in his delirium talked constantly of the past, of Europe, and the ship, and the mountains he had climbed, and whose names were on his Alpenstock. Again he was at Carnarvon, going over the old castle, and again at Melrose, fighting on the fourth of July with Neil McPherson, who had said his mother was not a lady. Then there were quieter moods, when he talked of and to little Bessie McPherson, whom he had never seen, but who came to him in his delirium, and, with her sunny blue eyes and golden hair, hovered around his bed, while he questioned her of the little room high up in the hotel, where she went without her dinner so often, while her heartless mother dined luxuriantly.
"Send for her and bring her here, where she can have enough to eat. Why don't you send for Bessie?" he would say to them; and once he said it to Miss McPherson, who was standing by his bedside, and who replied: "I have sent for her; she is coming."
"All right!" he answered. "Stuff her when she comes. Give her all the mince pie she can eat, and all the griddle cakes. She never saw any at home."
After that he was more quiet; but every morning and evening he asked, "Has Bessie come?" and when told, "Not yet," he would reply, "Send her to me when she comes; I want to see her."
And so the time went on until the fever spent itself, and there came a morning when Grey awoke to perfect consciousness of the present and a vague remembrance of the past. They told him how long he had been sick, and how anxious they had been.
"Did I talk much?" he asked his Aunt Lucy, when she was alone with him.