"I was truly sorry to leave town, on
your account and on my father's. But my dear adopted sister is paramount
with me now. You will not grudge her my care or my love, for she may not
long be with me to claim them. There is nothing but sorrow here in all
our hearts; sorrow, and an ever-present dread."
Book the Eighth.
A FIGHT AGAINST TIME.
CHAPTER I.
A DREAD REVELATION.
The early fast train by which Valentine Hawkehurst travelled brought him
into town at a quarter past nine o'clock. During the journey he had been
meditating on the way in which he should set to work when he arrived in
London. No ignorance could be more profound than his on all points
relating to the medical profession. Dimly floating in his brain there
were the names of doctors whom he had heard of as celebrated men--one for
the chest, another for the liver, another for the skin, another for the
eyes; but, among all these famous men, who was the man best able to cope
with the mysterious wasting away, the gradual, almost imperceptible
ebbing of that one dear life which Valentine wanted to save?
This question must be answered by some one; and Valentine was sorely
puzzled as to who that some one must be.
The struggling young writer had but few friends. He had, indeed, worked
too hard for the possibility of friendship. The cultivation of the
severer Muses is rarely compatible with a wide circle of acquaintances;
and Valentine, if not a cultivator of these severe ones, had been a hard
and honest worker during the later reputable portion of his life.
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