FullReads

Lansing turned and entered rooms 5 and 6. His patient was standing by the curtained window. “Do you want to know your fate?” he asked, lightly.

She turned and looked at him out of her lovely eyes; the quaint, listening expression in her face still remained, but she saw him, this time.

“Am I well?” she asked, calmly.

“Yes; … perfectly.”

She sat down by the window, her slender hands folded, her eyes on him.

“And now,” she asked, “what am I to do?”

He understood, and bent his head. He had an answer ready, trembling on his lips; but a horror of presuming on her gratitude kept him silent.

“Am I to go back … to him?” she said, faintly.

“God forbid!” he blurted out. With all his keen eyesight, how could he fail to see the adoration in her eyes, on her mute lips’ quivering curve, in every line of her body? But the brutality of asking for that which her gratitude might not withhold froze him. It was no use; he could not speak.

“Then–what? Tell me; I will do it,” she said, in a desolate voice. “Of course I cannot stay here now.”

Something in his haggard face set her heart beating heavily; then for a moment her heart seemed to stop. She covered her eyes with a swift gesture.

“Is it pain?” he asked, quickly. “Let me see your eyes!” Her hands covered them. He came to her; she stood up, and he drew her fingers from her eyes and looked into them steadily. But what he saw there he alone knows; for he bent closer, shaking in every limb; and both her arms crept to his shoulders and her clasped hands tightened around his neck.

Which was doubtless an involuntary muscular affection incident on successful operations for lamellar or zonular cataract.

* * * * *

That day they opened the steel box. She understood little of what he read to her; presently he stopped abruptly in the middle of a sentence and remained staring, reading on and on in absorbed silence.

Content, serene, numbed with her happiness, she watched him sleepily.

He muttered under his breath: “Sprowl! What a fool! What a cheap fool! And yet not one among us even suspected him of that!”

After a long time he looked up at the girl, blankly at first, and with a grimace of disgust. “You see,” he said, and gave a curious laugh–“you see that–that you own all this land of ours–as far as I can make out.”

After a long explanation she partly understood, and laughed outright, a clear child’s laugh without a trace of that sad undertone he knew so well.

“But we are not going to take it away from your club–are we?” she asked.

“No,” he said; “let the club have the land–your land! What do we care? We will never come here again!” He sat a moment, thinking, then sprang up. “We will go to New York to-morrow,” he said; “and I’ll just step out and say good-bye to Sprowl–I think he and his wife are also going to-morrow; I think they’re going to Europe, to live! I’m sure they are; and that they will never come back.”

And, curiously enough, that is exactly what they did; and they are there yet. And their establishment in the American colony is the headquarters for all nobility in exile, including the chivalrous Orleans.

Which is one sort of justice–the Lansing sort; and, anyway, Coursay survived and married an actress a year later. And the club still remains in undisturbed possession of Eileen Lansing’s land; and Major Brent is now its president.

As for Munn, he has permanently retired to Munnville, Maine, where, it is reported, he has cured several worthy and wealthy people by the simple process of prayer.