urse.

"He always is here. I don't see him now."

"I haven't seen him since Lady Chetwynde's arrival."

"Did my lady see him?"

"I think she did, Sir."

"You don't know what passed?"

"No, Sir. Except this, that the valet hurried out, looking very pale,
and has not been back since."

"Ah!" murmured the doctor to himself. "She has suspected something,
and has come on. The valet has fled. Could this scoundrel have been
the guilty one? Who else could it be? And he has fled. I never liked
his looks. He had the face of a vampire."

The doctor took away some of the medicine with him, and at the same
time he took with him one of the glasses which stood on a table near
the bed. Some liquid remained in it. He took these away to subject
them to chemical analysis. The result of that analysis served to
confirm his suspicions. When he next came he directed the nurse to
administer the antidote regularly, and left another mixture also.

Lord Chetwynde lay between life and death. At the last verge of
mortal weakness, it would have needed but a slight thing to send him
out of life forever. The only encouraging thing about him for many
days was that he did not get worse. From this fact the doctor gained
encouragement, though he still felt that the case was desperate. What
suspicions he had formed he kept to himself.

Hilda, meanwhile, prostrated by this new attack, lay helpless,
consumed by the fierce fever which rioted in all her veins. Fiercer
and fiercer it grew, until she reached a critical point, where her
condition was more perilous than that of Lord Chetwynde himself. But,
in spite of all that she had suffered, her constitution was strong.
Tender hands were at her service, kindly hearts sympathized with her,
and the doctor, whose nature was stirred to its depths by pity and
compassion for this beautiful stranger, who had thus fallen under the
power of so mysterious a calamity, was unremitting in his attentions.
The crisis of the fever came, and all that night, while it lasted, he
staid with her, listening to her disconnected ravings, and
understanding enough of them to perceive that her fancy was bringing
back before her that journey from England to Lausanne, whose fatigues
and anxieties had reduced her to this.

"My God!" cried the doctor, as some sharper lamentation burst from
Hilda; "it would be better for Lord Chetwynde to die than to survive
a wife like this!"

With the morning the crisis had passed, and, than