Her dress was wet to the touch, drenched with dew. Feeling half crazy with dread, I gently shook her.
She started, and staring with dazed eyes, sat up, rubbed her eyes (thank God! she had only been asleep, but that was bad enough!). Then she said, “Oh, dear!” looked at me, first with sharp inquiry, then with a smile, and held out her hands to be lifted up.
“How could you?” I said, as she clung to me.
“My uncle Pym came and said cruel things; said your inhuman treatment of me was the talk of the countryside: that I owed it to myself to leave you and go and live with him; and when I told him what I thought of him, got in a fearful rage, told me I was a fool and a dupe, and I should rue it, and went away,” she said, in her direct, childish manner. “Then I felt very bad—so lonely—and came here. I could not help crying, and I expect I cried myself to sleep. But I am not sorry!” she added, triumphantly, “for you look so ill, that I see you have really cared; that you really do love me!”
If I had not been so thankful to find and hold my darling to my heart once more, this would have been exasperating.
“Lilia, your absurd want of faith will be your ruin,” I told her. “Do you know that since our first meeting my experience of you has taught me that Faith is not only necessary to people’s happiness, but to their soundness in mind and body?”
Then I cautioned her to be careful what she said and did before those men—there would be talk enough of to-day’s incidents as it was,—and we went back to the house.
But the shock of that malignant old man’s visit had its natural result. Before morning my darling was suffering greatly. As soon as the telegraph-office was open I wired to Dr. Taylor (the specialist to whom Dr. Hildyard had introduced me, and who had promised to come to us if necessary). By midday he came. Towards evening a pale, delicate little boy was taken to his mother to be kissed. She was quite revived by the fact that he was a boy.
“You may say I am selfish! I am,” she said, wistfully, to me afterwards. “But if it had been a girl, and you had loved her like my father loved me, what room would there have been in your heart for me?”
June —.