Page:Richard Marsh--The goddess a demon.djvu/311

Rh never acted again. After that hideous night brain fever supervened. For weeks she lay between life and death. More than once the doctors gave her up. Fortunately, doctors are not omniscient. After all, God was merciful—to me.

Almost her first words, when the darkest hour had given place to the first glimmerings of dawn, took the shape of a question: "Where is Tom?" Her scamp of a brother! After all she had suffered for him, he was foremost in her thoughts.

"I hope that he is on the road to fortune."

Looking up at me with her big eyes, which had grown bigger, and sunk farther in her head, she asked me what I meant. I explained. I had supplied Young Hopeful with the wherewithal which would enable him to seek for gold in what was then the new El Dorado—the Klondyke region. He had started on his quest. But he never found what, at least nominally, he had gone to look for. Some months afterwards I learnt that he had died; fallen at night into the waters of the Yukon river and been drowned. My correspondent went on to explain that he was dead drunk at the time; which explanation I kept from his sister. I did not wish her to think that his end had been unbecoming to a man.

Bessie and I have been married just long