Very feebly and faintly the pulse of life is flickering in Keith
Athelstone's frame. Very despairingly does Lady Etwynde watch beside
him.
It is twelve hours since that last message went. Twelve hours, and
in every one of these has that same question been on the dying
lips--"Will she come?"
They cannot tell. They can only hope.
At last he falls asleep, and Lady Etwynde sits there, sad and anxious
and full of grief for the two lives whose short years have held such
bitter suffering--before which now stretches the gulf of an eternal
parting.
The sky grows rosy with the dawn, the sunlight steals in through the
closed blinds, and plays about the quiet room, and Lady Etwynde
softly opens the window, and the cool fresh air steals in, and its
breath plays over the pallid young face that lies on the pillows,
looking like sculptured marble. Quite suddenly he lifts his languid
eyelids and looks eagerly, joyfully up. "She is coming!" he cries.
"I know it."
The hours pass on, but that inward conviction remains unshaken.
Something--some mysterious prescience for which he cannot
account--tells him that his darling will be by his side. He is quite
patient now, and quite calm--calm with the fulness of a great
content. The day passes on to noon and noon to even-tide. He asks
no more that question: "Will she come?" He knows it is answered.
The door opens softly and without sound. He is lying with closed
eyes--the hired nurse is by his side. Lady Etwynde is not there.
Some one comes in and moves towards the bed, and bends over the quiet
figure. How still he is; is it sleep, or----?
The lids, with their long, dark lashes, suddenly open and looking
back to her own with the old boyish, adoring love that nothing can
chill or change, are the "bad blue eyes" of her girlhood's lover.
She sinks on her knees; she is trembling greatly; she finds no words
to say, but none are needed.
Pain, weakness, weariness, seem to flee away before the magic of her
presence; over the white face comes such radiance and tenderness as
never has she seen.
"It is you. I knew you would come, Lorry."
"My darling boy!" she half sobs, half sighs, and then a great
darkness sweeps over her like a cloud, and she sees his face no more.
The nurse summons Lady Etwynde. She is horrified at this occurrence.
It will be so bad for her patient. "The shock is enough to kill
him"--so she murmurs as they busy themselves with the unconscious
woman.
Keith watches them quietly, not even anxious or disturbed. All his
life seems to have become one great calm now.
"Kill me----" he says, as the nurse's words reach him. "She has
given me life!"
And indeed it seems as if she had, for from that hour slowly but
surely he begins to mend.
The weakness and exhaustion against which his physicians had battled,
no longer hold his strength in their control. Hope, peace, joy have
come to him with Lauraine's presence, and with them comes also the
desire to live.
"It is wonderful!" say the doctors.
"It is wonderful!" echoes Lady Etwynde, standing by Lauraine's side
some two days later, and noting the change that at last leaves room
for hope.
The blue eyes look up to one face--the face that has haunted his
life, and seems to have called him back across the border-land on
which his feet have rested.
"It is not wonderful," they seem to say, "it is only--love."