What if it were so, and this nurse was Genevra? The very thought fired Wilford's brain, and when next his physician came he looked with some alarm upon the great change for the worse exhibited by his patient. That surgeon's forte was more in dressing ghastly wounds than in subduing fever, and as he held Wilford's hand, he said: "You have a fever, my friend, and it is increasing fast. Perhaps you would like to see our new physician, Dr. Grant. He is great on fevers."
"Dr. Grant--Dr. Morris Grant?" Wilford exclaimed, starting up in bed with a fierce energy which surprised the surgeon.
"Yes, Dr. Morris Grant, from Massachusetts," the latter replied, his surprise increasing when Wilford rejoined: "Send Satan himself sooner than he. I hate him."
The words dropped hissingly from the firmly set teeth, and Wilford fell back upon his pillow, exhausted with excitement and anger that Morris Grant should be there in the same building and offered as his physician.
"Never while my reason lasts," he whispered to himself, with hatred of Morris growing more intense with every beat of his wiry pulse.
Wilford was very sick, and when next the surgeon came around he knew by the bright, restless eyes that reason was tottering.
"Shall I send for your friends?" he asked, and Wilford answered, savagely: "I have no friends--none, at least, but what will be glad to know I'm dead."
And that was the last, except the wild words of a maniac, which came from Wilford's lips for many a day and night. When they said he was dangerous, Marian Hazelton the "new nurse," sought and obtained permission to attend him, and again the eyes of the other occupants of the room were turned wonderingly toward her as she bent over the sick man, parting his matted hair, smoothing his tumbled pillow, and holding the cooling draught to the parched lips which muttered strange things in her ear, talking of Brighton, of Alnwick and Rome--of the heather on the Scottish moors, and the daisies on Genevra's grave, where Katy once sat down.
"She did not know Genevra was there," he said. "She never guessed there was a Genevra; but I knew, and I felt almost as if the dead were wronged by that act of Katy's. Do you know Katy?" and his black eyes fastened upon Marian, who, with the strange power she possessed over her patients, soothed him into quiet, while she told him she knew Katy, and talked to him of her, telling of her graceful beauty, her loving heart, and the sorrow she would feel when she heard how sick he was.