"Not alive," was the brief but significant answer.
"Not alive! Great heavens, doctor, don't tell me that my miserable accident will cost the little girl her life!"
"Ah! your accident: how was that?" bending over Madeline.
"Why, you see," explained Davlin, "She picked up the pistol, and not being acquainted with the use of fire-arms, desired to investigate under my instructions. Having loaded it, explaining the process by illustration, she, being timid, begged me to put it up. Laughing at her fear, I was about to obey, when moving around carelessly, my hand came in contact with that chair, setting the thing off. The sight of my bleeding arm frightened her so that I saw she was about to faint. As I caught her I myself lost consciousness, and we fell together. But how will she come out, doctor? tell me that; poor little girl!"
"She will come out from this trance soon, to die almost immediately, or to pass through a fever stage that may result fatally later. Her bodily condition is one of unusual prostration from fatigue; and evidently, she has been sustaining some undue excitement for a considerable time."
"Been traveling, and pretty well tired with the journey. That, I suppose, taken with this pistol affair – but tell me, doctor, what she will need, so that I may attend to it immediately."
"If she is living at noon," said Dr. Vaughan, reflectively, "it will be out of the question to remove her from here, without risking her life for weeks to come. If she comes out of this, and you will leave her in my hands, I will, with the aid of this good woman," nodding toward the nurse, "undertake to pull her through. It will be necessary that she have perfect quiet, and sees no face that might in any manner excite her, during her illness and convalescence."
Davlin mused for a few moments before making answer. He did not care to excite remark by calling in unnecessary attendants. Dr. Vaughan he knew by reputation as a skilful physician. As well trust him as another, he thought, and it was no part of his plan to let this girl die if skill could save her.
In answer to his natural inquiry as to how the doctor was so speedily on the spot when needed, Henry had truthfully replied that he knew the medical man by sight, and that, fortunately, he was passing when he ran down to the street for assistance. Davlin was further convinced that he, Henry, knew nothing save that the young lady rang for him to show her out, and he, according to orders, had obeyed.
"Well, sir," Davlin said, at last, "I shall leave the lady and the premises entirely in your hands, as soon as the crisis has passed. Then, as my presence might not prove beneficial, while I carry this arm in a sling, at least, I will run down into the country for a few days. My man, here, is entirely at your disposal. Don't spare any pains to pull her through safely, doctor. I will look in again at noon."
He rose and went softly out of the room, the doctor having answered him only by a nod of assent.
"Zounds, how weak I feel," he ejaculated. "I hope the girl won't die. Anyhow, I have no notion of figuring at a death-bed scene. So I'll just keep myself out of the way until the thing is decided. Then, I'll run down and let Cora coddle me up a bit. I can explain my wounded arm as the result of a little affair at the card-table."
Noon came, and slowly, slowly, stern Death relaxed his grasp upon the miserable girl, for Death, like man, finds no satisfaction in claiming willing victims. Slowly the life fluttered back to her heart; and because Death had yielded her up, and to retain it would be to lose her life, reason forsook her.
Under the watchful care of the skilled nurse, and the ministrations of the young physician, she now lay tossing in the delirium of fever.
Nothing worse to fear, for days at least, reported the doctor. So the afternoon train bore Lucian Davlin away from the city and his victim, to seek repose and diversion in the society of his comrade, Cora.
"She will come out of this now, I think," he muttered. "Then – Oh! I'll tame your proud spirit yet, my lady! I would not give you up now for half a million."
And he meant it.
CHAPTER VIII.
THREADS OF THE FABRIC
What had become of Madeline Payne?
The question went the round of the village, as such questions do. The servants of Oakley fed upon it. They held secret conferences in the kitchen, and grew loud and argumentative when they knew John Arthur was safely out of hearing. They bore themselves with an air of subdued, unobservant melancholy in his presence, and waxed important, mysterious and unsatisfactory, when in converse with the towns folk – as was quite right and proper, for were they not, in the eyes of mystery hunters, objects of curiosity secondary only to their master himself?
The somber-faced old housekeeper gave utterance to a doleful croak or two, and a more doleful prophecy. But after a summons from John Arthur, and a brief interview with him in the closely shut sacredness of his especial den, not even the social intercourse of the kitchen and the inspiration that the prolonged absence of the master always lent to things below stairs, could beguile from her anything beyond the terse statement that "she didn't meddle with her master's affairs," and she "s'posed Miss Madeline knew where she was."
The housemaid, who read novels and was rather fond of Miss Payne, grieved for a very little while, but found in this "visitation of providence," as John Arthur piously termed it, food for romance weaving on her own responsibility. She entertained Peter, the groom, coachman and general factotum, with divers suggestions and suppositions, each more soul harrowing than the last, making of poor Madeline a lay figure upon which she fitted all the catastrophes that had ever befallen her yellow-covered "heroinesses."
The villagers talked. It was all they could do, and their tongues were very busy for a time until, in fact, a fresher sensation arrived. Nurse Hagar was viewed and interviewed; but beyond sincere expression of grief at her disappearance, and the unvarying statement that she had not even the slightest conjecture as to the fate of the lost girl, nothing could be gained from her.
Hagar was somewhat given to rather bluntly spoken opinions of folk who happened to run counter to her notions in regard to prying, or, in fact, her notions on any subject. In the present emergency she became a veritable social hedgehog, and was soon left to solitude and her own devices.
Whatever were Hagar's opinions on the subject, she kept them discreetly locked within her own breast. She had received, at their last interview, a revelation of the depth and force of character which lay dormant in the nature of Madeline; and she believed, even when she grieved most, that the girl would return, and that when she came she would make her advent felt.
John Arthur went to the city "to put the matter in the hands of the detectives," he said. But as he most fervently hoped and wished that he had seen the last of his "stumbling – block," and believed that of her own will she would not return, it is hardly to be supposed that the Secret Service was severely taxed.
Be this as it may, the Summer days passed and he heard nothing of Madeline.
Meantime, the neat little hotel that rejoiced in the name of the Bellair House, displayed on a fresh page of its register the signature of Lucian Davlin once more, and underneath it that of Mrs. C. Torrance.
Mrs. C. Torrance was a blonde young widow, dressed in weeds of most elegant quality and latest style, with just the faintest hint of an approaching season of half mourning.
Mrs. Torrance had now been an inmate of Bellair House some days, and she certainly had no reason to complain that her present outlook was not all that could be desired. Already she had met the object of her little masquerade, and it was charming to see the alacrity with which John Arthur placed himself in the snare set for him by these plotters, and how gracefully he submitted as the cords tightened around him.
Over and over again Davlin thanked his lucky star for having so ordered his goings that, on his previous visit, he had never been brought into immediate contact with John Arthur. Over and again he congratulated himself that his meetings with Madeline had been kept their own secret, for he knew nothing of the watchful, jealous eyes of old Hagar.
On a fine summer morning,