"Are you very much astonished,
Maud? Still, there is nothing you can do for me, and we shall want
you to-morrow."
Realizing that there was no need for her, the girl went out, and when
the door closed behind her the little white-haired lady bent down and
gazed at her patient long and steadily. Then she shook her head, and
moved back to the seat she had risen from with perplexity in her face.
In the meanwhile, Maud Barrington sat by the open window in her room
staring out into the night. There was a whispering in the birch
bluff, and the murmuring of leagues of grasses rose from the prairie
that stretched away beyond it. Still, though the wind fanned her
throbbing forehead with a pleasant coolness, the nocturnal harmonies
awoke no response in her. Sleep was out of the question, for her
brain was in a whirl of vague sensations, through which fear came
uppermost every now and then. Why anything which could befall this
man who had come out of the obscurity, and was, he had told her, to
go back into it again, should disturb her, Maud Barrington did not
know; but there was no disguising the fact that she would feel his
loss grievously, as others at Silverdale would do. Then with a
little tremor she wondered whether they must lose him, and rising
stood tensely still, listening for any sound from the room where the
sick man lay.
There was nothing but the sighing of the grasses outside and the
murmur of the birches in the bluff, until the doleful howl of a
coyote stole faintly out of the night.
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