Death, too, had been very near her boy; and she
watched him with a morbid apprehension, fearful of every summer breeze that
ruffled his flaxen hair.
She was tired of Spa, and secretly anxious to cross the frontier, and
wander through Germany, away to the further-most shores of the Danube; but
was fain to wait patiently till her father's medical adviser--an English
physician, settled at Spa--should pronounce him strong enough to travel.
"That hurried journey to the Isle of Wight sent me back prodigiously," Mr.
Lovel told his daughter. "It will take me a month or two to recover the
effects of those abominable steamers. The Rhine and the Danube will keep,
my dear Clary. The castled crag of Drachenfels can be only a little
mouldier for the delay, and I believe the mouldiness of these things is
their principal charm."
So Clarissa waited. She had not the courage to tell her father of those
shapeless terrors that haunted her by day, and those agonising dreams that
visited her by night, which she fancied might be driven away by movement
and change of scene; she waited, and went on suffering, until at last
that supreme egotist, Marmaduke Lovel, was awakened to the fact, that
his daughter was looking no better than when he first brought her to
Belgium--worse rather, incontestably worse. He took alarm immediately.
The discovery moved him more than he could have supposed anything outside
himself could have affected him.
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