' I will do what I can,' she said—' I will do what I honestly can. Are you coming with me?'
' No; he wants to see you alone.' And, as she spoke, a sudden pang of jealousy and rebellion struck her. Why should she who would give her life for him with thankful willingness be powerless to help him, while half that love from another woman might prove so efficacious, could she but exert its strength? But next moment that was gone; no other thought but the mother's yearning for her son was there.
Sybil went from her up the passage to Charlie's room, and entered softly. At that moment, hearing perhaps the rustle of her dress, he turned his head on his pillow, and looked towards the door, and in dead silence for a moment their eyes met. His face was very much flushed; his eyes, as his mother had said, were very bright, but bright with the burning of fever; and the indescribable sharpness and hardness of feature that comes with illness was there. But as Sybil looked, no horror was hers, and no shrinking. All she knew was that a man, suffering and ill, lay there—a man to whom she was the reason of living and the sun of life; a man whom she had known long, liked always, loved never. In his eyes there burned not only fever, but, as he saw her, the unquenchable light of love in all its dumb faithfulness. She had seen it often before, and had rejected it, but now it smote upon her heart. Something within her melted; and as a butterfly cracks its chrysalis, and emerges weak, hardly yet conscious of the new life, of the iridescence of its own wings, of the sunlight which till now has been hidden from it by that sheath of its shell, so something new trembled on the threshold of her heart—pity—which knew not yet that with which it was entwined. And with the waking of herself within her came the knowledge of what to do and say intuitively, because she was at last a woman.
She came quickly across the room, smiling at him.
