‘You wish to drink? Your lips are parched.’ She held a glass filled with some cooling beverage to her mouth. ‘Have you eaten anything to-day, Caroline?’

‘I cannot eat.’

‘But soon your appetite will return: it must return—that is, I pray God it may!’

In laying her again on the couch she encircled her in her arms, and, while so doing, by a movement which seemed scarcely voluntary, she drew her to her heart, and held her close-gathered an instant.

‘I shall hardly wish to get well, that I may keep you always,’ said Caroline.

Mrs. Pryor did not smile at this speech. Over her features ran a tremor, which for some minutes she was absorbed in repressing.

‘You are more used to Fanny than to me,’ she remarked erelong. ‘I should think my attendance must seem strange, officious?’

‘No: quite natural and very soothing. You must have been accustomed to wait on sick people, ma’am. You move about the room so softly, and you speak so quietly, and touch me so gently.’

‘I am dexterous in nothing, my dear. You will often find me awkward, but never negligent.’

Negligent, indeed, she was not. From that hour Fanny and Eliza became ciphers in the sick-room. Mrs. Pryor made it her domain; she performed all its duties; she lived in it day and night. The patient remonstrated, faintly, however, from the first, and not at all erelong. Loneliness and gloom were now banished from her bedside; protection and solace sat there instead. She and her nurse coalesced in wondrous union. Caroline was usually pained to require or receive much attendance; Mrs. Pryor, under ordinary circumstances, had neither the habit nor the art of performing little offices of service; but all now passed with such ease, so naturally, that the patient was as willing to be cherished as the nurse was bent on cherishing—no sign of weariness in the latter ever reminded the former that she ought to be anxious. There was, in fact, no very hard duty to perform; but a hireling might have found it hard.

With all this care, it seemed strange the sick girl did not get well; yet such was the case: she wasted like any snow-wreath in thaw; she faded like any flower in drought. Miss Keeldar, on whose thoughts danger or death seldom intruded, had at first entertained no fears at all for her friend; but seeing her change and sink from time to time when she paid her visits, alarm clutched her heart. She went to Mr. Helstone and expressed herself with so much energy, that that gentleman was at last obliged, however unwillingly, to admit the idea that his niece was ill of something more than a migraine; and when Mrs. Pryor came and quietly demanded a physician, he said she might send for two if she liked. One came, but that one was an oracle: he delivered a dark saying of which the future was to solve the mystery, wrote some prescriptions, gave some directions—the whole with an air of crushing authority—pocketed his fee, and went. Probably, he knew well enough he could do no good, but didn’t like to say so.

Still, no rumour of serious illness got wind in the neighbourhood. At Hollow’s Cottage it was thought that Caroline had only a severe cold, she having written a note to Hortense to that effect; and Mademoiselle contented herself with sending two pots of currant jam, a receipt for a tisane, and a note of advice.

Mrs. Yorke being told that a physician had been summoned, sneered at the hypochondriac fancies of the rich and idle, who, she said, having nothing but themselves to think about, must needs send for a doctor if only so much as their little finger ached.

The ‘rich and idle,’ represented in the person of Caroline, were meantime falling fast into a condition of prostration, whose quickly consummated debility puzzled all who witnessed it, except one; for that one alone reflected how liable is the undermined structure to sink in sudden ruin.