At last Bellair came back. "Fanny believes that this is the night of crisis," he said slowly. All the buoyancy had left his voice. "But--but Elwyn, I hope you won't mind--the fact is she's set her heart on your seeing him. I told her what you told me about yourself, I mean your illness as a child, and it's cheered her up amazingly, poor girl! Perhaps you could tell her a little bit more about it, though I like to think that if the boy gets through it"--his voice broke suddenly--"she won't remember this--this awful time. But don't let's keep her waiting--" He took Elwyn's consent for granted, and quickly the two men walked up the stairs of the high house, on and on and on.
"It's a good way up," whispered Bellair, "but Fanny was told that a child's nursery couldn't be too high. So we had the four rooms at the top thrown into two."
They were now on the dimly-lighted landing. "Wait one moment--wait one moment, Hugo." Bellair's voice had dropped to a low, gruff whisper.
Elwyn remained alone. He could hear slight movements going on in the room into which Bellair had just gone; and then there also fell on his ears the deep, regular sound of snoring. Who could be asleep in the house at such a moment? The sound disturbed him; it seemed to add a touch of grotesque horror to the situation.
Suddenly the handle of the door in front of him moved round, and he heard Fanny Bellair's voice, unnaturally controlled and calm. "I sent Nanna to bed, Jim. The poor old creature was absolutely worn out. And then I would so much rather be alone when Sir Joseph brings back the other doctor. He admits--I mean Sir Joseph does--that to-night _is_ the crisis."
The door swung widely open, and Elwyn, moving instinctively back, visualized the scene before him very distinctly.
There was a screen on the right hand, a screen covered, as had been the one in his own nursery, with a patchwork of pictures varnished over.
Mrs. Bellair stood between the screen and the pale blue wall. Her slim figure was clad in some sort of long white garment, and over it she wore an apron, which he noticed was far too large for her. Her hair, the auburn hair which had been her greatest beauty, and which he had once loved to praise and to caress, was fastened back, massed up in as small a compass as possible. That, and the fact that her face was expressionless, so altered her in Elwyn's eyes as to give him an uncanny feeling that the woman before him was not the woman he had known, had loved, had left,--but a stranger, only bound to him by the slender link of a common humanity.