"He's all right," said the doctor abruptly. "I am not anxious about him--now."
"Do you mean--that you think that he will live?"
She put the question breathlessly, and waited for his reply almost afraid to draw a breath, so great was her anxiety for his verdict. It was the question that had been ringing incessantly in her ears for days past, for, with the gradual increase of Francis' strength, a new hope had been born--a hope of which she hardly dared to think, and which had yet been ever present with her.
The answer was long in coming, but at last Robert Gale spoke.
"I can see no reason now why he should not--live--why he should not live out his life to the allotted span. He will never be robust, of course, but he has no disease. Even the heart-weakness has responded to treatment, or rather, I will say, to happiness, in a remarkable way."
For a moment the room and its contents danced before the girl's eyes and a sense of the greatest gladness warmed her through and through. All through the days that had passed since she had made the Great Discovery, since she became aware that she loved Francis Heathcote with every fibre of her being, there had been behind her new-found joy a sense of dread lest the dark Angel of Death should dissipate it with one sweep of his flaming sword. She had tried not to think of it, to steep herself heart and soul in the one joy of loving, to surrender herself entirely to the magic thrall of such a love as she had dreamed of but had never dared to think would be hers; and now, the doctor's verdict opened to her such a vista of delight for the future that her mind could hardly grasp it. What matter if Francis were never robust? would it not be her greatest happiness to guard him and give him all the care and devotion she could bestow? She asked no more than to be with him always. It would be her privilege to see that nothing endangered the health which had in a measure returned to him.
The doctor was walking up and down the room with short, quick steps, but for a while she did not realise that he was addressing her until she heard a sentence which arrested her attention.
"The situation is terribly difficult."
"Why is it difficult?" she asked.
"Oh," he answered with obvious irritation, "I know that it was my doing. It was the only course open to me at the time, and you've acted nobly. You have been wonderful. But now----" He was silent for a moment, and then he said half to himself, "I've set a wheel rolling, and now--I can't see how to stop it, and that's the truth."