Lucius was silent. His own suggestion of a possible attempt to poison was sufficient to account for these delirious words of Lucille. It was only strange that she should have associated her father’s name with the idea; that in her distempered dream, he, the father—to whose image she clung with such fond affection—should have appeared to her in the character of a parricide. ‘We must try and get back her strength, nurse,’ said Lucius, after a thoughtful pause; ‘with returning health all these strange fancies will disappear.’ ‘Yes, sir, with returning health!’ sighed Mrs. Milderson, whose cheerfulness seemed somewhat to have deserted her. This sick-nursing was, as she was wont to remark, much more trying than attendance upon matrons and their new-borns. It lacked the lively element afforded by the baby. ‘I feel lonesome and down-hearted-like in a sick-room,’ Mrs. Milderson would remark to her gossips, ‘and the cryingest, peevishest baby that ever was would be a blessing to me after a fever case.’ ‘You don’t think her worse, do you?’ asked Lucius, alarmed by that sigh. ‘No, sir; but I don’t think her no better,’ answered Mrs. Milderson, with the vagueness of an oracle. ‘She’s that low, there’s no cheering of her up. I’m sure, I’ve sat and told her about some of my reglar patients—Mrs. Binks in the West Inja-road, and Mrs. Turvitt down by the Basin—and done all I could think of to enliven her, but she always gives the same impatient sigh, and says, “I do so long to get well, nurse.” She must have been very low, Dr. Davoren, before she took to her bed.’ ‘Yes,’ said Lucius, remembering that sudden fainting-fit. ‘She had allowed herself too little rest in her attendance upon her grandfather.’ ‘She must have worn herself to a shadder, poor dear young creature,’ said Mrs. Milderson. ‘But don’t you be uneasy, sir,’ pursued the matron, having done her best to make him so; ‘if care and constant watchfulness can bring her round, round she shall be brought.’ Thus Lucius Davoren went about his daily work henceforward with a new burden on his mind—the burden of care for that dear patient, for whom, perchance, his uttermost care might be vain. CHAPTER XV. THE DAWN OF HOPE.