Slowly, quietly she turned—not to Hugh, but to Stephen. He stood near the door, trembling and cringing, his eyes fixed and staring—at something—cringing as if some terrible hand clutched or menaced him. With a cry of pain and of terror, such as the sufferers in Purgatory may shriek, he rushed from the room, sobbing and gibbering,
“Don’t touch me, Uncle Dick! Don’t touch me!”
Helen, scorn, hatred on her face, and no atom of pity, was following him; but Latham stayed her.
“I’ll go,” he said; “there is mania in his eyes. Stay with Hugh, he needs you. I’ll see to Pryde.” He thrust the confession in his pocket-book, the pocket-book in his coat. “That paper,” he told her, “will straighten out Hugh’s trouble. He’ll be free and clear to-morrow, believe me. But stay with him now; he needs you.”
Helen yielded. She went and knelt down by Hugh and laid her hands on his knee. As Latham was leaving the room, she said to him, with a grave smile—
“You see, you were wrong, Doctor. Daddy did come to me.”
“I wonder,” was his reply. “I wonder. Finding the paper in that book may all have been coincidence—who knows?”
“Daddy and I know,” Helen said; “Daddy and I know.”
Stephen turned restlessly on his pillows, and Angela Latham bent down and cozied them deftly.
“You’re a wonderful nurse,” he told her gratefully.
“You have,” Mrs. Latham returned cordially. “But you know what Mrs. Hemans says, or perhaps it’s Mark Twain, I always get them mixed, ‘the labor we delight in physics pain’—I’ve quite enjoyed the trouble—and Georgie Washington, but you begin to do me credit. You’re going to be a good boy now and do just as I say.”
Angela held out her ring-heavy hand. “Put it there, pard,” she commanded. And after a moment the sick man lifted his thin, bloodless hand and laid it in hers. “Perhaps I’m going to be good—though it hadn’t occurred to me till you mentioned it—but I can scarcely be required to be a boy. I was quite a year or two old at your birth.”
“Heavens, yes; you have,” Stephen replied.
He lay in his own bed in Pont Street, and nothing was much changed in his room from what it had been for years; a temple and workshop of flight. Pictures of birds, of bats and of butterflies and of man-made aircraft covered the walls. The skeleton of a flying fox shared the glass case of a flying fish. A long workmanlike table stretched the length of the room—a table stacked with orderly piles of plans and designs, groups of models, trays of “parts” and of tools. Every book in the room (and they were many) treated of the air and air navigation. “Not a novel in the whole show,” Angela had told her husband disgustedly. And on Stephen’s desk lay a half-finished manuscript positively bristling with small detail drawings of rotary and fixed engines, sketches of exhaust manifolds and working diagrams of many-bladed propellers, his pen beside it, as he had left it on the last day he had journeyed to Oxshott.