Daisy did not come down to dinner that night, and the maid who called her the next morning reported her as ill and acting very strangely.  Through the summer a malarial fever had prevailed to some extent in and about Rouen, and the physician whom Madame Lafarcade summoned to the sick girl expressed a fear that she was coming down with it, and ordered her kept as quiet as possible.

“She seems to have something weighing on her mind.  Has she heard any bad news from home?” he asked, as in reply to his question where her pain was the worst Daisy always answered: 

“It reached him too late—­too late, and I am so sorry.”

Madame knew of no bad news, she said, and then as she saw the foreign paper lying on the table, she took it up, and, guided by the pencil marks, read the notice of Guy Thornton’s marriage, and that gave her the key at once to Daisy’s mental agitation.  Daisy had been frank with her and told her as much of her story as was necessary, and she knew that the Guy Thornton married to Julia Hamilton had once called Daisy his wife.

“Excuse me, she is, or she has something on her mind, I suspect,” she said to the physician, who was still holding Daisy’s hand and looking anxiously at her flushed cheeks and bright, restless eyes.

“I thought so,” he rejoined, “and it aggravates all the symptoms of her fever.  I shall call again to-night.”

He did call and found his patient worse, and the next day he asked Madame Lafarcade: 

“Has she friends in this country?  If so, they ought to know.”

A few hours later, and in his lodgings at Berlin, Tom read the following dispatch: 

“Mrs. Thornton is dangerously ill.  Come at once.”

It was directed to Mr. McDonald, who with his wife had been on a trip to Russia, and was expected daily.  Feeling intuitively that it concerned Daisy, Tom had opened it, and without a moment’s hesitation packed his valise, and, leaving a note for the McDonalds when they should return, started for Rouen.  Daisy did not know him, and in her delirium she said things to him and of him which hurt him cruelly.  Guy was her theme, and the letter which went “too late, too late.”  Then she would beg of Tom to go for Guy, to bring him to her and tell him how much she loved him and how good she would be if he would take her back.

“Father wants me to marry Tom,” she said in a whisper, and Tom’s heart almost stood still as he listened; “and Tom wanted me, too, but I couldn’t, you know, even if he were worth his weight in gold.  I could not love him.  Why, he’s got red hair, and such great freckles on his face, and big feet and hands with freckles on them.  Do you know Tom?”

“Yes, I know him,” Tom answered sadly, forcing down a choking sob, while the “big hand with the great freckles on it” smoothed the golden hair tenderly and pushed it back from the burning brow.

“Don’t talk any more, Daisy; it tires you so,” he said, as he saw her about to speak again.