CHAPTER XXVIII.

ONLY A DREAM.

Of all those who lived through the fever, poor Alick Corfield’s case had been the most desperate while it lasted.  Mr. Gryce, his fellow-sufferer, had been up and about his usual work, extracting Aryan roots and impaling Lepidoptera for a month and more, while Alick was still in bed among ice-bags and Condy’s Fluid, and as bad as at the beginning—­indeed, worse, having had a relapse which nothing but his wiry constitution, backed by his mother’s scientific nursing, could have pulled him through.  Gradually the danger passed, and this time his convalescence was solid, and, though slow, uninterrupted.  He began to creep about the house by the aid of sticks and arms, and he came down stairs for the first time on the day when the Harrowbys and Birketts returned home; but he remained in strict quarantine, and Steel’s Corner was scrupulously avoided by the neighbors as the local lazaretto which it would be sinful to invade.  By all but Leam, who went daily to ask after the invalid, and to keep the mother company for exactly half an hour by the clock.

One day when she went on her usual errand Mrs. Corfield met her at the hall-door, “Alick will be glad to see you, my dear,” she called out, radiant with happiness, as the girl crossed the threshold.  “We are in the drawing-room to-day, as brisk and bonny as a bird:  such a treat for him, poor dear!”

“I am glad,” said Leam, who held a basket of early spring flowers in her hand.  “Now you are happy.”  Tears came into the poor mother’s haggard eyes.  “Happy, child!  You do not know what I feel,” she said with tremulous emotion.  “Only a mother who has been so near to the loss of her dearest, so near to heartbreak and despair, as I have been, can know the blessed joy of the reprieve.”

“How you love him!” said Leam in a half whisper.  “I loved mamma like that.”

“Yes, poor child!  I remember,” said Mrs. Corfield with compassion.  She forgot that at the time she had thought the girl’s love and despair, both the one and the other, exaggerated and morbid.  She met her now on the platform of sympathy, and her mind saw what it brought to-day as it had seen what it had brought before, but she was not conscious of the contradiction.

“I thought I should have died too when she did.  I wish I had,” said Leam, looking up to the sky with dreamy love, as if she still thought to meet her mother’s face in the blue depths.

“My poor dear! it was terrible for you,” sighed the elder woman sympathetically.  “But you must not always mourn, you know.  There is a time for everything, even for forgetting, and for being happy after sorrow.”

“Never a time for me to forget mamma, nor to be happy,” said Leam.

“Why not?” answered Mrs. Corfield in her impatient way.  “You are young, nice-looking, in tolerably good health, but you are black round your eyes to-day.  You have friends:  I am sure all of us, from my husband downward, think a great deal of you.  And Alick has always been your friend.  Why should you not be happy?”