And suddenly there appears to him the figure of a woman with a ghastly, drawn face, a face that he does not know, with staring eyes that gleam glassily, and accuse. He feels the touch of a rigid hand, cold and unresponsive. His eyes seem starting from his head.
The door opens, and one of the physicians stands looking at him in a startled way. There is something frightful in this man, with clenched hands, the veins like whip cords on his neck and forehead, and his ghastly face.
_In the mountains near Mauch Chunk, August, 18--._ This is the first time for months I have felt like writing. We have been here since June. After my illness I had a great longing to get away, away, away; anywhere out of the excitement, away from the furniture, the servants, the surroundings that seemed to have become so hateful to me that if I looked upon them I must shriek. It seemed as though I should never be strong enough to go.
Edgar was as anxious to get away with me as I was to go. A great change has taken place in him. He has ever been good and thoughtful, but it is impossible to describe the lengths to which his affection drives him now. If his business has been pressing, these last months must have been disastrous to him, for he has hardly left my side for an hour. There is a new expression in his eyes when he looks at me. He seems to feel as if he were guilty of some terrible crime against me, and to be ever trying to expiate it. Sometimes this amuses me a little, but his earnestness makes me almost feel unhappy at times.
Once in a while, if we have been sitting quietly alone, he will look at me silently for a time, and then say with almost a groan:
"Oh, if you only knew, Helen! If you only knew all that I suffered in those weeks!"
I was very ill for a long time. He seems hardly to realize that I am again well and safe. I would never dare let him know the agony of mind as well as body, that I endured so long.
I feel differently, too, about some things. I think that whatever regret Edgar felt at first, and before my confinement, he suffered a keen disappointment and unhappiness at the loss of the child. He has made but one allusion to it, but he betrayed his deep feeling then, unconsciously.