At last the medical opinion was given that little Arthur might, with great care and incessant watching ("which it is plain he will have, Mrs. Grey,” added the old doctor, bowing and smiling), grow up to be a man yet.

When Dr. Anstruther said this, Christian felt as if the whole world had brightened.

She had no one to tell her joy to, for Dr. Grey was out, but she stood in her familiar retreat at the window—­oh, what that window could have revealed of the last few weeks!—­and her tears, long dried up, poured down like summer rain.

And then Dr. Grey came in, very much agitated; he had met the doctor in the street and been told glad tidings.  She had to compel herself into sudden quietness, for her husband’s sake, which, indeed, was a lesson now daily being learned, and growing every day sweeter in the learning.

“Christian,” he said, when they had talked it all over, and settled when and where Arthur was first to go out of doors, with various other matter of fact things which she thought would soonest calm the father’s emotion—­“Christian, Dr. Anstruther tells me my boy could not have lived but for you and your care.  I shall ever remember this—­ever feel grateful.”

A pang, the full meaning of which she then did not in the least understand, shot through Christian’s heart.  “You should not feel grateful to his mother.”

“Do you mean, really, that you love him like—­like a mother?”

“Of course I do.”

Dr. Grey said nothing more, but his wife felt him put his arm round her.  She leaned her head against him and, though she still wept—­for the tears, once unsealed, seemed painfully quick to rise—­still she was contented and at rest.  Worn and weary a little, now the suspense was over the reaction came, but very peaceful.  Unconsciously there ran through her mind one of the foolish bits of poetry she had been fond of when a girl: 

    "In the unruffled shelter of thy love,
     My bark leaped homeward from a stormy sea,
     And furled its sails, and, like a nested dove—­“

“Mother!” called out Arthur’s feeble, fretful voice, and in a minute the poetry had all gone out of her head, and she was by her boy’s side, feeding him, jesting with him, and planning how the first day of his convalescence should be celebrated by a grand festival, inviting the two others to tea in his room.  It was her own room, from which he had never been moved since the first night.  How familiar had grown the crimson sofa, the tall mirror, the carved oaken wardrobe!  The bride had regarded these splendors with a wondering half-uneasy gratitude; but now, to Arthur’s nurse and “mother,” they looked pleasant, home-like, and dear.

“We will pull the sofa to the fire.  Help, papa, please, and place the little table before it.  And we will send written invitations which papa shall deliver, with a postman’s knock, at the nursery door.  We won’t send him one, I think?”