“Of course you will, dear Aunt Cynthia,” replied Robert, soothingly.

Suddenly Cynthia’s face took on a new expression.  She looked at Robert, deadly pale, and her jaw dropped.  “He will not—­die,” she said, with stiff lips.  “It is not as bad as that?”

“Oh no, no; I am sure he will not,” Robert cried, wonderingly and pityingly.  “Don’t, Aunt Cynthia.”

“If he dies,” she said—­“if he dies—­and he has loved me all this time, and I have never done anything for him—­I cannot bear it; I will not bear it; I will not, Robert!”

“Oh, he isn’t going to die, Aunt Cynthia.”

“I want to go to him,” she said.  “I will go to him.”

Robert looked helplessly from her to Fanny.  “I am afraid you can’t just now, Aunt Cynthia,” he replied.

Fanny came resolutely to his assistance.  “Of course you can’t, Miss Lennox,” she said.  “The doctors won’t let you see him now.  You would do him more harm than good.  You don’t want to do him harm!”

“No, I don’t want to do him harm,” returned Cynthia, in a wailing, hysterical voice.  She threw herself down upon a sofa and began sobbing like a child, with her face hidden.

A young doctor entered and stood looking at her.

Robert turned to him.  “It is my aunt, and she is agitated over Mr.
Risley’s accident,” he said, coloring a little.

Instantly the young physician’s face lost its expression of astonishment and assumed the soothing gloss of his profession.  “Oh, my dear Miss Lennox,” he said, “there is no cause for agitation, I assure you.  Everything is being done for Mr. Risley.”

“Will he be blind?” gasped Cynthia, with a great vehemence of woe, which seemed to gainsay the fact of her years.  It seemed as if such an outburst of emotion could come only from a child all unacquainted with grief and unable to control it.

The young doctor laughed blandly.  “Blind?  No, indeed,” he replied.  “He might have been blind had this happened twenty-five years ago, but with the resources of the present day it is a different matter.  Pray don’t alarm yourself, dear Miss Lennox.”

“Can you call a carriage for my aunt?” asked Robert.  He went close to Cynthia and laid a hand on her slender shoulder.  “I am going to have a carriage come for you, and perhaps Mrs. Brewster will be willing to go home with you in it.”

“Of course I will,” replied Fanny.

“You hear what Dr. Payson says, that there is nothing to be alarmed about,” Robert said, in a low voice, with his lips close to his aunt’s ear.

Cynthia made no resistance, but when the carriage arrived, and she was being driven off, with Fanny by her side, she called out of the window with a fierce shamelessness of anxiety, “Robert, you must come and tell me how he is this afternoon, or I shall come back here and see him myself.”

“Yes, I will, Aunt Cynthia,” he replied, soothingly.  He met the doctor’s curious eyes when he turned.  The young man had a gossiping mind, but he forbore to say what he thought, which was to the effect that—­why under the heavens, if that woman cared as much as that for that man, she had not married him, instead of letting him dangle after her so many years?  But he merely said: