Bessie's Fortune

"What did you say? What did you call the young lady?" Grey asked, excitedly, and Flossie replied: "Bessie--Bessie McPherson, from Wales. I remember now, you must know her, for Sir Jack told me that he once spent a Christmas at Stoneleigh, and you were there with him."

"Yes, I know her," Grey said, with a tremor in his voice, and a pallor about his lips. "Tell me how long she has been sick, and who is with her."

Then Flossie told him that immediately on her return home from America, Daisy had taken Bessie with her to Switzerland, where they spent the remainder of the summer and a part of the autumn, making their way to Paris in October, and going on to Italy sometime in November; that she, Flossie, had come abroad with her grandmother and had fallen in with the McPhersons at the Italian lakes, and kept with them ever since; that Bessie had not seemed well or happy for some weeks; and that almost immediately after her arrival in Rome she had taken her bed and had been rapidly growing worse until now, when the doctor gave little hope of her recovery.

"She does not know us," Flossie said, "and she talks so piteously of her old home, and wants us to take her back to the garden where the birds are singing in the yews, and where she says there is just one place between her father and the wall, and that is for her. Oh, Mr. Jerrold, what if she should die!"

"She must not--she shall not," Grey answered her, energetically, and by the sense of bitter pain in his heart he knew that Bessie McPherson was more to him than any other girl could ever be, and if she died the world would lose much of its brightness for him.

He had never forgotten her, and over and over again in both his sleeping and waking hours there had arisen before him a vision of her face, as he had seen it when first he went to Stoneleigh, and as he saw it there last, pale and worn and sad, but inexpressibly lovely and sweet. And now, Flossie told him, she was dying, and for a moment he grew cold and faint; then he rallied, and saying, "I will go and see Mrs. McPherson," bade Flossie good-morning, and started for No.----, fourth floor.

His knock was answered by Daisy herself, whose face was very pale, and whose eyes were swollen and red with watching and tears. All her better nature had been aroused; the mother love was in the ascendant now, and in her anxiety for her child she had forgotten much of her coquetry and was almost womanly in her grief.