He ate no breakfast whatever, and, as the morning wore miserably away and his torpor of mind and body seemed to increase, he at last ventured dizzily out into the streets, looking up and down the little French-Canadian city for the sign-board of an English doctor. He found one, finally; and in response to his ring a homesick young surgeon just over from London, after cheerily pounding him about and casually looking down his throat, handed him an antiseptic gargle for tonsillitis, and then talked for an hour of home, of the London music-halls, and of his hatred for the Colonies.
When Hartley made his escape from the sickeningly odorous, drug-scented little surgery, a new irrational hatred of the subdued, bustling, big-roomed hotel took hold of him. Following a sudden impulse, he bought a pair of heavy walking-shoes and a little leather knapsack, madly determined by a few days of open-air tramping through the valley of the St. Lawrence to walk himself once more into health and strength.
He had covered five dreary miles of what seemed endless, undulating dust and gravel when he tottered weakly to the whitewashed palings of a _habitant's_ cottage and gave up. Crawling and staggering to the door, he incoherently cried for water.
The swarthy, keen-eyed little French doctor who, two hours later, came bustling to his straw-mattress bedside, grew suddenly serious as he bent over his stalwart patient, while the patient himself, as he sank from soft gray heights of silence into black pits of torturing desolation, listened languidly to a thin, far-away voice that seemed to be telling somebody that he was in a bad way, with black diphtheria, and that above all things he must be kept quiet, and must not be moved. It was the last declaration that left the sick man so dreamily content. He felt that he could rest there forever, almost--that nothing better could come to him than to lie there for countless years, resting.
When, three days later, the Spauldings returned to New York with no news of Hartley or his where-abouts, Cordelia went through a second day of silent torture. She wrote to him twice, and, receiving no reply, telegraphed in Henry Spaulding's name to Hartley's Quebec hotel for information. No definite news could be given her, so she wrote to him still again, imploring him to come back at once, saying that she needed him, that she had much to confess to him and ask of him. In the course of a few weeks her different letters were returned to her, unopened.