After this, long days passed over in a monotonous round of care; for no one seemed to think of Molly’s leaving the Hall during the woeful illness that befell Mrs. Osborne Hamley.  It was not that her father allowed her to take much active part in the nursing; the squire gave him carte-blanche, and he engaged two efficient hospital nurses to watch over the unconscious Aimee; but Molly was needed to receive the finer directions as to her treatment and diet.  It was not that she was wanted for the care of the little boy; the squire was too jealous of the child’s exclusive love for that, and one of the housemaids was employed in the actual physical charge of him; but he needed some one to listen to his incontinence of language, both when his passionate regret for his dead son came uppermost, and also when he had discovered some extraordinary charm in that son’s child; and again when he was oppressed with the uncertainty of Aimee’s long-continued illness.  Molly was not so good or so bewitching a listener to ordinary conversation as Cynthia; but where her heart was interested her sympathy was deep and unfailing.  In this case she only wished that the squire could really feel that Aimee was not the encumbrance which he evidently considered her to be.  Not that he would have acknowledged the fact, if it had been put before him in plain words.  He fought against the dim consciousness of what was in his mind; he spoke repeatedly of patience when no one but himself was impatient; he would often say that when she grew better she must not be allowed to leave the Hall until she was perfectly strong, when no one was even contemplating the remotest chance of her leaving her child, excepting only himself.  Molly once or twice asked her father if she might not speak to the squire, and represent the hardship of sending her away—­the improbability that she would consent to quit her boy, and so on; but Mr. Gibson only replied,—­

’Wait quietly.  Time enough when nature and circumstance have had their chance, and have failed.’

It was well that Molly was such a favourite with the old servants; for she had frequently to restrain and to control.  To be sure, she had her father’s authority to back her; and they were aware that where her own comfort, ease, or pleasure was concerned she never interfered, but submitted to their will.  If the squire had known of the want of attendance to which she submitted with the most perfect meekness, as far as she herself was the only sufferer, he would have gone into a towering rage.  But Molly hardly thought of it, so anxious was she to do all she could for others and to remember the various charges which her father gave her in his daily visits.  Perhaps he did not spare her enough.  She was willing and uncomplaining; but one day after Mrs. Osborne Hamley had ‘taken the turn,’ as the nurses called it, when she was lying weak as a new-born baby, but with her faculties all restored, and her fever gone, when spring buds were blooming out, and spring birds sang merrily, Molly answered to her father’s sudden questioning that she felt unaccountably weary; that her head ached heavily, and that she was aware of a sluggishness of thought which it required a painful effort to overcome.