"Sue, you do care! My dearest, you DO care?"
Susan, panting, clung to him.
"Oh, yes--yes!" she whispered. And, at a sound from the hall, she crushed his handkerchief back into his hand, and walked to the deep archway of a distant window. When he joined her there, she was still breathing hard, and had her hand pressed against her heart, but she was no longer crying.
"I am mad I think!" smiled Susan, quite mistress of herself.
"Susan," he said eagerly, "I was only waiting for this! If you knew- -if you only knew what an agony I've been in yesterday and to-day--! And I'm not going to distress you now with plans, my dearest. But, Sue, if I were a divorced man now, would you let it be a barrier?"
"No," she said, after a moment's thought. "No, I wouldn't let anything that wasn't a legal barrier stand in the way. Even though divorce has always seemed terrible to me. But--but you're not free, Mr. Bocqueraz."
He was standing close behind her, as she stood staring out into the night, and now put his arm about her, and Susan, looking up over her shoulder, raised childlike blue eyes to his.
"How long are you going to call me that?" he asked.
"I don't know--Stephen," she said. And suddenly she wrenched herself free, and turned to face him.
"I can't seem to keep my senses when I'm within ten feet of you!" Susan declared, half-laughing and half-crying.
"But Sue, if my wife agrees to a divorce," he said, catching both her hands.
"Don't touch me, please," she said, loosening them.
"I will not, of course!" He took firm hold of a chair-back. "If Lillian--" he began again, very gravely.
Susan leaned toward him, her face not twelve inches away from his face, her hand laid lightly for a second on his arm.
"You know that I will go with you to the end of the world, Stephen!" she said, scarcely above a whisper, and was gone.
It became evident, in a day or two, that Kenneth Saunders' illness had taken a rather alarming turn. There was a consultation of doctors; there was a second nurse. Ella went to the extreme point of giving up an engagement to remain with her mother while the worst was feared; Emily and Susan worried and waited, in their rooms. Stephen Bocqueraz was a great deal in the sick-room; "a real big brother," as Mrs. Saunders said tearfully.