*CHAPTER IX* *RENUNCIATION* Frau von Arnim was waiting at the door of Hildegarde’s bedroom. In the half-light Nora saw only the dim outline of the usually grave and composed face, but the hand that took hers betrayed more than the brightest searchlight could have done. It was icy cold, steady, but with something desperate in its clasp. "Nora, are you accustomed to people who are very ill?" "My mother is often ill," Nora answered, and the fear at her heart seemed to pass into her very blood. "But surely Hildegarde—it is not serious?" Frau von Arnim shook her head. "I do not know," she said. "She fainted suddenly, and since then she has been in a feverish state which I do not understand. Poor little Hildegarde!" She spoke half to herself, quietly, almost coldly. Only Nora, strung to that pitch of sensitiveness where the very atmosphere seems to vibrate in sympathy, knew all the stifled pain, the infinite mother-tenderness which the elder woman cloaked behind a stern reserve. And because the best of human hearts is a complicated thing answering at once to a dozen cross-influences, Nora’s pity was intensified by the swift realisation that even her wonderful new happiness might be struck down in an hour, a minute, as this woman’s had been. "Let me look after her," she pleaded. "I can be such a good nurse. I understand illness—and I love Hildegarde." Something like a smile relaxed Frau von Arnim’s set features. The words had been so girlish in their enthusiasm and self-confidence. "I know," she said, "and Hildegarde loves you. She has been asking after you ever since she recovered consciousness. Let us go in." She opened the door softly and led the way into the silent room. The blinds had been drawn down, and the great four-posted bed loomed up grim and immense at the far end, seeming to swallow up the frail, motionless figure in its shadow. Nora tiptoed across the heavy carpet. "Hildegarde," she whispered, "are you better?" The closed eyes opened full and looked at her. "Yes, I am better. It is nothing. I fainted—only a little time after you had gone—and since then I have not been well." She stopped, her gaze, curiously intense and steadfast, still fixed on Nora’s face. Her sentences had come in jerks in a rough, dry voice. She now stretched out her hand and caught Nora’s arm. "You enjoyed your ride?" she whispered. "Nothing happened?" Troubled by the steady eyes and the feverish clasp, which seemed to burn through to her very bone, Nora answered hastily and with a forced carelessness. "Nothing very much. Bruno bolted with me in the woods, and I do not know what might have happened if Herr von Arnim had not come to my rescue. It was all my fault." Hildegarde turned her flushed face a little on one side. "I knew something had happened," she said almost to herself. "It all came over me when I fainted. I knew everything."