Incontinently Jeff Titus bolted around the side of the house and out of sight into the woods. When he returned, an hour later, he was carrying a half-armful of kindling. Circumstantially and at some length he explained to Stair that he had spent the entire hour in looking for it. Stair accepted the explanation in grave credulity and forebore to glance towards the high-piled heap of kindling in the woodshed.
At noon Eve awoke. She was very weak, very tired, very thin and big-eyed. But she was alive.
And in Jeff’s heart there was something that made him yearn to howl aloud in rapture and roll on the grass, and to join the church all over again, and to thrash some mythical man for speaking mythical ill of Ephraim Stair; and to turn over his farm and his savings to foreign missions, and to get very drunk indeed, and to buy Eve a gold watch.
Being a Kentucky mountaineer, and a Titus to boot, he contented himself with grinning down upon his sick wife and grunting:
“Feel better? That’s nice. Be all right, pretty soon, now. Reckon I’d best be gittin’ in some more wood, b’fore it rains. So long!”
Robin Adair, like his master, knew Eve was on the way to health again. But being only a dog and not a mountaineer, Robin did not sneak out of the house to hide his emotion. He stood beside the bed, his dark eyes aglow, his furry bulk quivering all over with puppyish joy; and wagging his plumed tail, frantically, every time his mistress looked at him.
One evening a few days later the two men were smoking together in the dooryard before turning in. Eve had been made comfortable for the night and was asleep.
She had gained a little ground, but her convalescence was maddeningly slow and uncertain to Jeff. The horror of the past fortnight or so had left him nerve-shaken. In spite of all Stair’s assurances, he could not throw off his fear for her safety.
“She has been through a terrible illness,” patiently explained Stair for the hundredth time. “Her body and her mind are exhausted. She lies there, like that, because she is resting. She is resting, because nature is making her rest. She is steadily getting better. Bar accidents, she is practically out of danger. Her strength is beginning to seep back, too. It would come back faster, of course, if she could rally her tired mind to some great interest in life—something that wouldn’t tire or excite her too much. It would help Mother Nature along. An interest in life is a wonderful aid, in convalescence. A bit of unexpected good news, for instance——”
“Good news, hey?” mused Jeff, his bony hands supporting his leathern face as he cogitated. “Good news? H’m!”