life
as North Aston knew it.

CHAPTER XXVIII.

ONLY A DREAM.

Of all those who lived through the fever, poor Alick Corfield's
case had been the most desperate while it lasted. Mr. Gryce, his
fellow-sufferer, had been up and about his usual work, extracting
Aryan roots and impaling Lepidoptera for a month and more, while Alick
was still in bed among ice-bags and Condy's Fluid, and as bad as at
the beginning--indeed, worse, having had a relapse which nothing but
his wiry constitution, backed by his mother's scientific nursing,
could have pulled him through. Gradually the danger passed, and this
time his convalescence was solid, and, though slow, uninterrupted. He
began to creep about the house by the aid of sticks and arms, and he
came down stairs for the first time on the day when the Harrowbys
and Birketts returned home; but he remained in strict quarantine, and
Steel's Corner was scrupulously avoided by the neighbors as the local
lazaretto which it would be sinful to invade. By all but Leam, who
went daily to ask after the invalid, and to keep the mother company
for exactly half an hour by the clock.

One day when she went on her usual errand Mrs. Corfield met her at the
hall-door, "Alick will be glad to see you, my dear," she called out,
radiant with happiness, as the girl crossed the threshold. "We are in
the drawing-room to-day, as brisk and bonny as a bird: such a treat
for him, poor dear!"

"I am glad," said Leam, who held a basket of early spring flowers
in her hand. "Now you are happy." Tears came into the poor mother's
haggard eyes. "Happy, child! You do not know what I feel," she said
with tremulous emotion. "Only a mother who has been so near to the
loss of her dearest, so near to heartbreak and despair, as I have
been, can know the blessed joy of the reprieve."

"How you love him!" said Leam in a half whisper. "I loved mamma like
that."

"Yes, poor child! I remember," said Mrs. Corfield with compassion. She
forgot that at the time she had thought the girl's love and despair,
both the one and the other, exaggerated and morbid. She met her now on
the platform of sympathy, and her mind saw what it brought to-day as
it had seen what it had brought before, but she was not conscious of
the contradiction.

"I thought I should have died too when she did. I wish I had," said
Leam, looking up to the sky with dreamy love, as if she still thought
to meet her mother's face in the blue depths.

"My