Biffen could not speak;
he looked with alarm at Amy's pallid face. In a few words she
told him of Reardon's condition.
'I feared this,' he replied under his breath. 'He was ill when I
saw him off at London Bridge. But Willie is better, I trust?'
Amy tried to answer, but tears filled her eyes and her head
drooped. Harold was overcome with a sense of fatality; grief and
dread held him motionless.
They conversed brokenly for a few minutes, then left the house,
Biffen carrying the hand-bag with which he had travelled hither.
When they reached the hotel he waited apart until it was
ascertained whether he could enter the sick-room. Amy rejoined
him and said with a faint smile:
'He is conscious, and was very glad to hear that you had come.
But don't let him try to speak much.'
The change that had come over his friend's countenance was to
Harold, of course, far more gravely impressive than to those who
had watched at the bedside. In the drawn features, large sunken
eyes, thin and discoloured lips, it seemed to him that he read
too surely the presage of doom.
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