While the dawn of Alice’s happiness, Olive lay suffering in all the dire humility of the flesh.  Hourly her breathing grew shorter and more hurried, her cough more frequent, and the expectoration that accompanied it darker and thicker in colour.  The beautiful eyes were now turgid and dull, the lids hung heavily over a line of filmy blue, and a thick scaly layer of bloody tenacious mucus persistently accumulated and covered the tiny and once almost jewel-like teeth.  For three or four days these symptoms knew no abatement; and it was over this prostrated body, weakened and humiliated by illness, that Alice and Dr. Reed read love in each other’s eyes, and it was about this poor flesh that their hands were joined as they lifted Olive out of the recumbent position she had slipped into, and built up the bowed-in pillows.  And as it had once been all Olive in Brookfield, it was now all Alice; the veil seemed suddenly to have slipped from all eyes, and the exceeding worth of this plain girl was at last recognized.  Mrs. Barton’s presence at the bedside did not soothe the sufferer; she grew restless and demanded her sister.  And the illness continued, her life in the balance till the eighth day.  It was then that she took a turn for the better; the doctor pronounced her out of danger, and two days after she lay watching Alice and Dr. Reed talking in the window.  ‘Were they talking about her?’ she asked herself.  She did not think they were.  It seemed to her that each was interested in the other.  ‘Laying plans,’ the sick girl said to herself, ’for themselves.’  At these words her senses dimmed, and when she awoke she had some difficulty in remembering what she had seen.

XXVII

‘Ah, ce cher Milord, comme il est beau, comme il est parfait!’ exclaimed Mrs. Barton, as she led him to his chair and poured out his glass of sherry.

But there was a gloom on his face which laughter and compliments failed for a moment to dissipate—­at last he said: 

’Ah, Mrs. Barton, Mrs. Barton! if I hadn’t this little retreat to take refuge in, to hide myself in, during some hours of the day, I should not be able to bear up—­Brookfield has prolonged my life for—­’

‘I cannot allow such sad thoughts as these,’ said Mrs. Barton laughing, and waving her white hands.  ’Who has been teasing notre cher Milord?  What have dreadful Lady Jane and terrible Lady Sarah been doing to him?’

‘I shall never forget this morning, no, not if I lived to a thousand,’ the old gentleman murmured plaintively.  ’Oh, the scenes—­the scenes I have been through!  Cecilia, as I told you yesterday, has been filling the house with rosaries and holywater-fonts; Jane and Sarah have been breaking these, and the result has been tears and upbraidings.  Last night at dinner I don’t really know what they didn’t say to each other; and then the two elder ones fell upon me and declared that it was