Chapter XLIX. At Stornham and at Broadmorlands - Page 2

not ill of the fever, as excited rumour had it; but I was ill, and the doctors and the vicar were alarmed. I had fought too long, and I was giving up, as I have seen the poor fellows in the ballroom give up. If they were not dragged back they slipped out of one's hands. If the fever had developed, all would have been over quickly. I knew the doctors feared that, and I am ashamed to say I was glad of it. But, yesterday, in the morning, when I was letting myself go with a morbid pleasure in the luxurious relief of it--something reached me--some slow rising call to effort and life."

She turned towards him in her saddle, listening, her lips parted.

"I did not even ask myself what was happening, but I began to be conscious of being drawn back, and to long intensely to see you again. I was gradually filled with a restless feeling that you were near me, and that, though I could not physically hear your voice, you were surely calling to me. It was the thing which could not be--but it was--and because of it I could not let myself drift."

"I did call you! I was on my knees in the church asking to be forgiven if I prayed mad prayers--but praying the same thing over and over. The villagers were kneeling there, too. They crowded in, leaving everything else. You are their hero, and they were in deep earnest."

His look was gravely pondering. His life had not made a mystic of him--it was Penzance who was the mystic --but he felt himself perplexed by mysteriously suggestive thought.

"I was brought back--I was brought back," he said. "In the afternoon I fell asleep and slept profoundly until the morning. When I awoke, I realised that I was a remade man. The doctors were almost awed when I first spoke to them. Old Dr. Fenwick died later, and, after I had heard about it, the church bell was tolled. It was heard at Weaver's farm- house, and, as everybody had been excitedly waiting for the sound, it conveyed but one idea to them--and the boy was sent racing across the fields to Stornham village. Dearest! Dearest!" he exclaimed.

She had bowed her head and burst into passionate sobbing. Because she was not of the women who wept, her moment's passion was strong and bitter.

"It need not have been!" she shuddered. "One cannot bear it--because it need not have been!"

"Stop your horse a moment," he said, reining in his own, while, with burning eyes and swelling throat, he held and steadied her. But he did not know that neither her sister nor her father had ever seen her in such mood, and that she had never so seen herself.

"You shall not remember it," he said to her.

"I will not," she answered, recovering herself. "But for one moment all the awful hours rushed back. Tell me the rest."

"We did not know that the blunder had been made until a