And so, when it came time for Mr Dawes to thank the Lord for his escape, he refused to commit himself to anything so ridiculous! He even went so far as to declare that the doctor had nothing to do with it, a statement which rather staggered the nurses. For hours Yvonne read to the blissful old chap. Sometimes she read to him in French, again in Russian, and occasionally in German. It was all one to him. He did not understand a word of it, but he was happy. He felt surprisingly young. She gave up a month to him and he was prepared to give up his life to her. To his utter amazement, however, she did not exact anything so valuable as that. Indeed, when his recovery was quite complete, she calmly forgot his existence and he sank back into the oblivion from which calamity had dragged him; sank back to the unhappy level of Mr Riggs and all the others who failed to interest her; and there he dreamed of exalted days when she wanted him to live, contrasting them with these days in which he might just as well be dead for all she seemed to care! He was one of the “old men” again. Mr Riggs, writhing with jealousy, repeatedly remarked, “I told you so,” and somehow felt revenged for the insolent orders she had given to Jones, depriving him of the right to even approach the door of the room in which his lifelong friend was dying. It had been a hard week for Mr Riggs. He hated her as he had never hated anyone in his life before. And yet he thanked God for her, and would have died for her! Nothing, nothing in the world would have given him more pleasure than to be critically ill for her! CHAPTER XI “Is there anything wrong with my hair, Mr Brood?” asked Lydia, with a nervous little laugh. They were in the study, and it was ten o'clock of a wet night in April. Of late he had required her to spend the evenings with him in a strenuous effort to complete the final chapters of the journal. The illness of Mr Dawes had interrupted the work, and he was now in a fever of impatience to make up for the lost time. He had declared his intention to go abroad with his wife as soon as the manuscript was completed. The editor of a magazine, a personal friend, had signified his willingness to edit the journal and to put it into shape for publication during the summer months, against Brood's return in the fall of the year. The master of the house spared neither himself nor Lydia in these last few weeks. He wanted to clear up everything before he went away. Lydia's willingness to devote the extra hours to his enterprise would have pleased him vastly if he had not been afflicted by the same sense of unrest and uneasiness that made incessant labour a boon to her as well as to him.