The attack of fever which had seemed to begin lightly for Lord Walderhurst assumed proportions such as his medical man had not anticipated.  His annoyance at finding his duties interfered with fretted him greatly.  He was not, under the circumstances, a good patient, and, partly as a result of his state of mind, he began, in the course of a few weeks, to give his doctors rather serious cause for anxiety.  On the morning following Emily’s confession to Dr. Warren she had received a letter from her husband’s physician, notifying her of his new anxieties in connection with his patient.  His lordship required extreme care and absolute freedom from all excitement.  Everything which medical science and perfect nursing could do would be done.  The writer asked Lady Walderhurst’s collaboration with him in his efforts at keeping the invalid as far as possible in unperturbed spirits.  For some time it seemed probable that letter writing and reading would be out of the question, but if, when correspondence might be resumed, Lady Walderhurst would keep in mind the importance of serenity to the convalescent, the case would have all in its favour.  This, combined with expressions of sympathetic encouragement and assurances that the best might be hoped for, was the gist of the letter.  When Dr. Warren arrived, Emily handed the epistle to him and watched him as he read it.

“You see,” she said when he looked up, “that I did not speak too soon.  Now I shall have to trust to you for everything.  I could never have borne it all by myself.  Could I?”

“Perhaps not,” thinking it over; “but you are very brave.”

“I don’t think I’m brave,” thinking it over on her own part, “but it seemed as if there were things I must do.  But now you will advise me.”

She was as biddable as a child, he told his wife afterwards, and that a woman of her height and carriage should be as biddable as she might have been at six years old, was an effective thing.

“She will do anything I tell her, she will go anywhere I advise.  I advise that she shall go to her husband’s house in Berkeley Square, and that together you and I will keep unobtrusive guard over her.  All is quite simple, really.  All would have been comparatively simple at the outset, if she had felt sure enough of her evidence to dare to confide in some practical person.  But she was too uncertain and too much afraid of scandal, which might annoy her husband.  She is deeply in awe of Lord Walderhurst and deeply in love with him.”

“When one realises how unnecessary qualities and charms seem to be to the awakening of the tender emotion, it is rather dull, perhaps, to ask why.  Yet one weakly asks it,” was Mrs. Warren’s summation.

“And one cannot supply the answer.  But the mere devotion itself in this nice creature is a thing to be respected.  She will control even her anxieties and reveal nothing while she writes her cheerful letters, as soon as she is allowed to write them.”