Linley had one instant left, in which he might have drawn, back into the library in time to escape Sydney's notice. He was incapable of the effort of will. Grief and suspense had deprived him of that elastic readiness of mind which springs at once from thought to action. For a moment he hesitated. In that moment she looked up and saw him.
With a faint cry of alarm she let the cloak drop from her hands.
As helpless as he was, as silent as he was, she stood rooted to the spot.
He tried to control himself. Hardly knowing what he said, he made commonplace excuses, as if he had been a stranger: "I am sorry to have startled you; I had no idea of finding you in this room."
Sydney pointed to her cloak on the floor, and to her hat on a chair near it. Understanding the necessity which had brought her into the room, he did his best to reconcile her to the meeting that had followed.
"It's a relief to me to have seen you," he said, "before you leave us."
A relief to him to see her! Why? How? What did that strange word mean, addressed to _her?_ She roused herself, and put the question to him.
"It's surely better for me," he answered, "to hear the miserable news from you than from a servant."
"What miserable news?" she asked, still as perplexed as ever.
He could preserve his self-control no longer; the misery in him forced its way outward at last. The convulsive struggles for breath which burst from a man in tears shook him from head to foot.
"My poor little darling!" he gasped. "My only child!"
All that was embarrassing in her position passed from Sydney's mind in an instant. She stepped close up to him; she laid her hand gently and fearlessly on his arm. "Oh, Mr. Linley, what dreadful mistake is this?"
His dim eyes rested on her with a piteous expression of doubt. He heard her--and he was afraid to believe her. She was too deeply distressed, too full of the truest pity for him, to wait and think before she spoke. "Yes! yes!" she cried, under the impulse of the moment. "The dear child knew me again, the moment I spoke to her. Kitty's recovery is only a matter of time."
He staggered back--with a livid change in his face startling to see. The mischief done by Mrs. Presty's sense of injury had led already to serious results. If the thought in Linley, at that moment, had shaped itself into words, he would have said, "And Catherine never told me of it!" How bitterly he thought of the woman who had left him in suspense--how gratefully he felt toward the woman who had lightened his heart of the heaviest burden ever laid on it!
Innocent of all suspicion of the feeling that she had aroused, Sydney blamed her own want of discretion as the one cause of the change that she perceived in him. "How thoughtless, how cruel of me," she said, "not to have been more careful in telling you the good news! Pray forgive me."
"You thoughtless! you cruel!" At the bare idea of her speaking in that way of herself, his sense of what he owed to her defied all restraint. He seized her hands and covered them with grateful kisses. "Dear Sydney! dear, good Sydney!"
She drew back from him; not abruptly, not as if she felt offended. Her fine perception penetrated the meaning of those harmless kisses--the uncontrollable outburst of a sense of relief beyond the reach of expression in words. But she changed the subject. Mrs. Linley (she told him) had kindly ordered fresh horses to be put to the carriage, so that she might go back to her duties if the doctor sanctioned it.
She turned away to take up her cloak. Linley stopped her. "You can't leave Kitty," he said, positively.
A faint smile brightened her face for a moment. "Kitty has fallen asleep--such a sweet, peaceful sleep! I don't think I should have left her but for that. The maid is watching at the bedside, and Mrs. Linley is only away for a little while."
"Wait a few minutes," he pleaded; "it's so long since we have seen each other."
The tone in which he spoke warned her to persist in leaving him while her resolution remained firm. "I had arranged with Mrs.
MacEdwin," she began, "if all went well--"
"Speak of yourself," he interposed. "Tell me if you are happy."
