“Don’t, Lee—oh, don’t!” she cried. “Oh, please don’t! I can’t bear it.”
“Don’t—what?” he asked, in surprise.
“That! Father does it. Oh, don’t, please! If only you were not so like him!”
She held both hands over her eyes, shivering. “Joan, you are quite overwrought,” he said gravely. “We shall have you ill next.”
“I’m not ill. I am not going to be ill. I am only—only—wretched.”
“But things are a little better than they were, dear Joan,” he said in soothing tones, which thrilled her again.
“Yes, I know. I wish you wouldn’t speak in that voice—like his! Yes, I know he is better from the burns; but it is so dreadful to see him like this, day after day the same, just knowing all of us, and not seeming to care—like himself speaking from behind a great thick curtain; and I can’t get at him—I can’t touch him. It isn’t he that speaks, and it isn’t me that he hears. I never thought illness could be so dreadful—could change a person so. And he isn’t changed really. It is his own dear self that is there, only one can’t reach him, one can’t touch him. And nobody seems able to do anything. Mr. Forest only says we are to wait—wait. I wonder how long! It’s enough to kill one.”
Her hands went over her eyes again, with a moan.
“‘Call upon me in the day of trouble!’” Leo said quietly.
“Yes. Father would tell me to think of that; but I can’t,” said Joan, looking up again, with inexpressible dreariness in her black eyes. “How can I? I can’t think of anything except father. I have tried to pray, and it is no use—there seems nobody to hear. God is so far-away; and now father seems far-away too; even when I am close beside him there is that dreadful far-away feeling, as if a black cloud were wrapping him all round, and keeping us off. Do you know the feeling? I always have it when I try to pray, and that keeps me from praying. But I never had it with dear, dear father before. I have always had him, and it was all I wanted; and now he can’t understand or answer, and nobody else is of any use. All the world is nothing to me except father.”