Mrs. Hanbury raised her eyes from her book and gazed at the pallid face in the sea of dark hair. "She might be asleep or dead. How exquisitely beautiful she is, and how like Dora. How very like Dora, but she is more beautiful even than Dora. Dora owes a great deal to her trace of colour and her animation. This face is the most lovely one I ever saw, I think. How gentle she looks! I wonder was Kate Grace that Poniatowski married like her. If so I do not wonder. Who could help loving so exquisite a creature as this?"
Both of the girl's hands were stretched outside the counterpane.
Mrs. Hanbury leaned forward, bent and kissed the one near her, kissed it ever so lightly.
The lids of the girl trembled slightly but did not open.
Mrs. Hanbury drew back afraid. She had perhaps awakened her.
Gradually something began to shine at the end of the long lashes, and a tear rolled down the sweet young pale face.
"That," she moved slightly the hand Mrs. Hanbury had kissed, "that made me, oh, so happy."
No more words were uttered, but when Mrs. Hanbury looked down upon her book her own eyes were full.
The touch of the lips upon that hand had brought more quiet into the girl's heart than all the muffling in the house or the whispered orders to the servants or the doctor's drugs.
"She believed I was asleep and she kissed my hand," thought the girl. No quiet such as this had ever entered her bosom before.
Day followed day in Chester Square, bringing slowly, almost imperceptibly, health and strength back to the exquisite form of Edith Grace. The spirituality lent by illness still more refined the delicate beauty of the girl, and when the colour came back to the lips, and the cheeks lost their pallor she seemed more like a being new-born of heaven to earth than a mortal of our homely race.
At the end of a week she was still restricted to her room, although allowed to sit up. The fear was not so much of physical weakness as of mental excitement. There was now no need to watch her by night. She seemed in perfect health, in that cool seraphic health of man before the Fall.
And what a change had taken place in the young girl's spirit! Her grandmother had told her that Mrs. Hanbury had insisted on making good the loss they had sustained in the failure of the bank, and more beside.