‘Yes, and all my hopes of winning a position which might make you proud of being my wife by and by. It would be a hard thing to forego all those, Lucille—to devote my mind and my life to a perhaps hopeless endeavour. Fondly as I love you, I am not chivalrous enough to say I will shut up my surgery to-morrow and start on the first stage to the Antipodes, or the Japan Islands, or Heaven knows where, in quest of your father. Yet I might do something. If I had but the slightest foundation to work upon I should hardly be afraid of success. I would willingly do anything, anything less than the entire sacrifice of my prospects—which must be your prospects too, Lucille—to prove how dear you are to me.’ ‘You really would? Ah! if you could find him—if you could reunite us, I should love you so dearly—at least, no,’ with a little gush of tenderness, ‘I could not love you better than I do now. But you would make me so happy.’ ‘Then I will try, dearest, try honestly. But if I fail—after earnest endeavour, and at the end of a reasonable period—if I fail in bringing your father to you living, or discovering when and how he died, you will not punish me for my failure. You will be my wife two or three years hence, come what may, Lucille. Give me that hope, sweet one. It will make me strong enough to face all difficulties.’ ‘I love you,’ she said in her low serious voice, putting her little hand into his; and that simple admission he accepted as a promise. CHAPTER XI. THE BIOGRAPHY OF A SCOUNDREL. The weakness and the languor that kept Homer Sivewright a prisoner in his bedroom were not the tokens of mortal illness. Death kept as yet at a respectful distance. The patient’s life might be prolonged even to man’s appointed measure of three score and ten, with care and skilful treatment. There was organic disease, but of a mild type. Lucius was not without hopes of a rally—that a period of perfect repose and quiet might, in some measure, restore the enfeebled frame—which, gaunt and wasted by sickness, was yet so mighty a skeleton. The man was tough; a creature of strong fibres, and muscles that had once been like iron. Above all, his life had been strictly temperate. Lucius augured well from these facts. The disease would remain always, more or less subject to treatment, but there might be a partial recovery. ‘You need not be anxious,’ he said, when Lucille questioned him earnestly about her grandfather. ‘Mr. Sivewright will be a long time dying. Or, in other words, he will fight hard with Death. We may keep him alive for some years longer, Lucille, if we take trouble.’ ‘I shall not think anything a trouble. I do not forget how good he has been to me, in his own cold way. But he has seemed so much weaker lately.’