“What else should I do but come?” returned Wingfold.
“I have seen you somewhere before,” said Lingard--“in one of my dreams, I suppose.”
Then, sinking his voice to a whisper, he added:
“Do you know you came in close behind HER? She looked round and saw you, and vanished!”
Wingfold did not even try to guess at his meaning.
“Hush, my dear fellow!” he said; “I must not let you talk wildly, or the doctor might forbid my seeing you.”
“I am not talking a bit wildly,” returned Leopold. “I am as quiet as a mountain-top. Ah! when I AM wild--if you saw me then, you might say so!”
Wingfold sat down on the side of the bed, and took the thin, hot hand next him in his own firm, cool one.
“Come now,” he said, “tell me all about it. Or shall your sister tell me?--Come here, please, Miss Lingard.”
“No, no!” cried Leopold hastily; “I will tell you myself. My poor sister could not bear to tell it you. It would kill her.--But how am I to know you will not get up and walk out the moment you have a glimpse of what is coming?”
“I would as soon leave a child burning in the fire, and go out and shut the door,” said Wingfold.
“You can go now, Helen,” said Lingard very quietly. “Why should you be tortured over again? You needn’t mind leaving me. Mr. Wingfold will take care of me.”
Helen left the room, with one anxious look at her brother as she went.
Without a moment’s further delay, Leopold began, and in wonderfully direct and unbroken narrative, told the sad evil tale as he had formerly told it to his sister, only more consecutively and quietly. Possibly his anxiety as to how the listener would receive it, served, by dividing him between two emotions, to keep the reuttered tale from overpowering him with freshened vividness. All the time, he kept watching Wingfold’s face, the expressions of which the curate felt those eyes were reading like a book.
He was so well prepared, however, that no expression of surprise, no reflex of its ghastfulness met Leopold’s gaze, and he went on to the end without a pause even. When he had finished, both sat silent, looking in each other’s eyes, Wingfold’s beaming with compassion, and Lingard’s glimmering with doubtful, anxious inquiry and appeal. At length Wingfold said: