He was deeply grieved for her, his heart yearned over her, but his words were few.
“Can you be ready to start, Monica, by the noon express?”
She bent her head in a silent assent, and moved away as one who walks in a dream.
“Poor child!” he said softly, “poor child! If only my love could make up to you for what you have lost; but alas! that is not what you want.”
It was a strange, sad, silent journey, almost as sad as the one in which Randolph had brought his bride to London. He was taking her back at last to her childhood’s home. Was he any nearer to her innermost self than he had been that day, now nearly three months ago?
He was hopeful that he had made an advance, and yet this sudden recall to Trevlyn disconcerted him. Apart from the question of the earl’s death, there was another trouble, he believed, hanging over Monica’s future. Tom Pendrill had been profiting by her absence to “experiment,” as she would have called it, upon Arthur, with results that had surprised even him, though he had always believed the case curable if properly treated. Randolph had had nothing to do directly with the matter, but Tom had written lately, asking him to find out the best authorities on spinal injuries, and get some one or two specialists to come and have a look at the boy. This Randolph had done at his own expense, and with the result, as he had heard a few days back, that Arthur was to be sent abroad for a year, to be under a German doctor, whose cures of similar cases had been bringing him into marked repute.
Monica had been, by Arthur’s special wish, kept in ignorance of everything. He was eagerly anxious, even at the cost of considerable suffering, to submit to the prescribed treatment, feeling how much good he had already received from Tom’s more severe remedies; but he knew how Monica shrank from the idea of anything that could give him pain, how terrible she would consider the idea of parting, how vehemently she would struggle to thwart the proposed plan. So he had begged that she might be kept in ignorance till all was finally settled. Indeed, he had some idea, not entirely discouraged by Tom, of getting himself quietly removed to Germany in her absence, so that she might be spared all the anxiety, misery, and suspense.