It was not true--he knew from the mutterings of Gyp's fever--but no one,
not even Summerhay's mother, should hear a whisper if he could help it.
At the door, he murmured:
"I don't know whether my girl will get through, or what she will do
after. When Fate hits, she hits too hard. And you! Good-bye."
Lady Summerhay pressed his outstretched hand.
"Good-bye," she said, in a strangled voice. "I wish you--good-bye."
Then, turning abruptly, she hastened away.
Winton went back to his guardianship upstairs.
In the days that followed, when Gyp, robbed of memory, hung between life
and death, Winton hardly left her room, that low room with creepered
windows whence the river could be seen, gliding down under the pale
November sunshine or black beneath the stars. He would watch it,
fascinated, as one sometimes watches the relentless sea. He had snatched
her as by a miracle from that snaky river.
He had refused to have a nurse. Aunt Rosamund and Mrs. Markey were
skilled in sickness, and he could not bear that a strange person should
listen to those delirious mutterings. His own part of the nursing was
just to sit there and keep her secrets from the others--if he could.
And he grudged every minute away from his post. He would stay for hours,
with eyes fixed on her face. No one could supply so well as he just that
coherent thread of the familiar, by which the fevered, without knowing
it, perhaps find their way a little in the dark mazes where they wander.
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