“Ah!”

“That troubled her, in the state she was in—­troubled her mightily.  She has been able to take a few spoonfuls of nourishment,” the doctor went on irrelevantly; “her pulse is improved; if she has no drawback she will get well.”

Lynde looked around him bewilderedly for a moment; then he covered his face with his hands.  “I thought she was dying!” he said under his breath.

That day and the next the girl’s life hung by a thread; then the peril passed, and her recovery became merely a question of careful nursing.  The days which immediately followed this certainty were the happiest Lynde had ever experienced.  Perhaps it was because his chamber was directly over Ruth’s that he sat there in the window-seat, reading from morning until night.  It was as near to her as he was permitted to approach.  He saw little of Mr. Denham and still less of Mrs. Denham during that week; but the doctor spent an hour or two every evening with Lynde, and did not find it tiresome to talk of nothing but his patient.  The details of her convalescence were listened to with an interest that would have won Dr. Pendegrast if he had not already been very well disposed towards the young fellow, several of whose New York friends, as it transpired, were old acquaintances of the doctor’s—­Dr. Dillon and his family, and the Delaneys.  The conversation between Lynde and Dr. Pendegrast at the Hotel Meurice had been hurried and disjointed, and in that respect unsatisfactory; but the minute history of Ruth’s previous case, which the doctor related to Lynde in the course of those long summer nights, set his mind completely at rest.

“I could never have given her up, anyway,” said Lynde to himself.  “I have loved her for three years, though I didn’t know it.  That was my wife’s slipper after all,” he added, thinking of the time when it used to seem to be sitting up for him at night, on his writing-table at Rivermouth, and how often it threw a gloom over him with its tragic suggestion.  “My wife’s slipper!” He repeated the phrase softly to himself.  There was nothing tragic in it now.

By and by the hours began to drag with him.  The invalid could not get well fast enough to keep pace with his impatience.  The day she was able for the first time to sit up a while, in an armchair wheeled by the bedside, was a fete day to the four Americans in the Couronne hotel.  If Lynde did not exhaust his entire inheritance in cut flowers on this occasion, it was because Dr. Pendegrast objected to them in any profusion in a sick-chamber.

“When am I to see her?” asked Lynde that evening, as the doctor dropped into the room to make his usual report.

“Let me think.  To-day is Tuesday—­perhaps we shall let you see her by Friday or Saturday.”

“Good heavens! why don’t you put it off thirty or forty years?”

“I haven’t the time,” returned Dr. Pendegrast, laughing.  “Seriously, she will not be strong enough until then to bear the least excitement.  I am not going to run any risks with Ruth, I can tell you.  You are very impatient, of course.  I will give you a soothing draught.”