Chapter 5 A Sacred Confidence
'Duke Radford was very ill. For a week he hovered between life and death, and Mrs. Burton's skill was taxed to the uttermost. There was no doctor within at least a hundred miles. One of the fishers at Seal Cove had set the broken collar bone, the work being very well done too, although the man was only an amateur in the art of bone-setting. But it was not the broken bone, nor any of his bruises and abrasions, which made 'Duke Radford's peril during that black week of care and anxiety. He was ill in himself, so ill in fact that Mrs. Burton lost heart, declaring that her father's constitution had broken up, and that half a dozen doctors could not pull him through if his time had come.
Katherine would not share this gloomy view, and was always hoping against
