He had stumbled upon the very thing Bell was there to talk about, his question indicating that he had no suspicion of the truth. Nor had he, and it came like a thunderbolt, when Bell, forgetting all her prudence, said impetuously: "Oh, Wilford, maybe you'll never go home. Maybe you'll--"
"Not die!" Wilford exclaimed, clasping his hands with sudden emotion. "Not die, you don't mean that. Who told you so? Who said I was near to death?"
"Dr. Grant," was Bell's reply, which brought a fierce frown to Wilford's face, and awoke all the angry passions of his heart.
"Dr. Grant," he repeated. "He says so because he wishes it. He would like me removed from his path, but it shall not be. I will not die. Tell him that. I will not die," and Wilford's voice was hoarse with passion as he raised his clinched fists in the air.
He was terribly excited, and in her fright Bell ran for Dr. Grant. But Wilford motioned him back, hurling after him words which kept him from the room the entire day, while the sick man rolled, and tossed, and raved in the delirium, which had returned, and which wore him out so fast. No one had the least influence over him except Marian Hazelton, who, without a glance at Mr. Cameron or Bell, glided to his side, and with her presence and gentle words soothed him into comparative quiet, so that the bitter denunciations against the saint who wanted him to die, ceased, and he fell into a troubled sleep.
Smoothing his pillow, and arranging the bedclothes tidily about him, Marian turned to meet the eyes of both Mr. Cameron and Bell fixed curiously upon her. With a strange feeling of interest they had watched her, both feeling an aversion to addressing her, and both wondering if she were indeed Genevra, as Katy had affirmed. They would not ask her, and both breathed more freely when, with a bow in acknowledgment of Mr. Cameron's compliment to her skill in quieting his son, she left the room.
Neither said what they thought of her, nor was her name once mentioned, but she was not for a moment absent from their minds as they from choice sat that night with Wilford, who slept off his delirium, and lay with his face turned from them, so that they could not guess by its expression what was passing in his mind.
All the next day he maintained the most frigid silence, answering only in monosyllables, while Bell kept wiping away the great drops of sweat constantly oozing out upon his forehead and about the pallid lips.