Miss Acton and Dr. Norton, who had driven home more rapidly, reached the house in time to prepare the minds of Mrs. Norton and Aunt Delia, and to get rooms and beds in readiness for the sufferers, and despatch messengers for medical aid.
The physician who examined Philip shook his head and looked grave, although he spoke encouragingly. The patient was suffering principally from shock and from the effects of the smoke which he had inhaled in such quantities. His burns were not serious, however, though they would doubtless be painful and require careful nursing; he proposed, nevertheless, to spend the night with his patient, and asked that a trained nurse be sent for at once, while, for the present at least, everybody must be excluded from the sick-room but Aunt Delia and himself.
And so, after the poor burned hands had been tenderly dressed and the little sufferer made as clean and comfortable as possible, the silence which had been so imperatively ordered settled down upon the sick-room, and there was no sound but the quick, irregular breathing of the patient and the ticking of the clock on the mantel.
Lord Ashden spent that night pacing restlessly up and down the floor, and when the doctor came out of the sick-chamber early the following morning, he called him into his room. “I want to know,” he began in a strange, monotonous voice, “just what the chances are for the boy’s life. No, don’t try to spare me, please. I prefer to know the truth.”
The physician, a strictly professional and apparently unsympathetic man, was moved to sudden pity as he remarked the traces of intense suffering in Lord Ashden’s face and manner:
“My dear fellow,” he said, an expression in his eyes which was most unusual to them, “I did not know the little chap was so dear to you.”
“He is all I have,” said Lord Ashden quietly. “All I have,” he repeated as though to himself, and then he went on:
“But you have not told me yet what you think of his condition.”
It was the strictly professional man who spoke this time.
“It is difficult to tell--just yet,” he said. “The burns are serious, although not necessarily fatal, and there has been a great shock to the general system, a very great shock; the action of the heart is weak, and there is a deplorable lack of vitality and less recuperative energy than I could wish to see. However”--He paused and looked at Lord Ashden steadily.