"I'm very thirsty," he murmured in his deep voice, which to hear again thrilled her. (Strange that, wet to the skin, he should be thirsty!)
Though she knew that he was ill, and perhaps very ill, she felt happier in that moment than she had ever felt. Happiness, exultant and ecstatic, rushed over her, into her, permeating and surrounding her. She cared for nothing save that she had him. She had no curiosity as to what he had been doing, what sufferings he had experienced, how his illness had come about, what his illness was. She lived exclusively in the moment. She did not even trouble about his thirst. Then gradually a poignant yet sweet remorse grew in her because, a year ago, before his vanishing, she had treated him harshly. She had acted for the best in the interests of his welfare, but was it right to be implacable, as she had been implacable, towards a victim such as he unquestionably was? Would it not have been better to ruin and kill him with kindness and surrender? For Elsie kindness had a quality which justified it for its own sake, whatever the consequences of it might be. And then she began to regret keenly that she had destroyed his letter; she would have liked to be able to show it to him to prove her constancy. Supposing he were to ask her if she had received it, what she had done with it. Could she endure the shame of answering: "I burnt it"?
"I'm so thirsty," he repeated. He was a man of one idea.
"Stay there," she whispered softly, squeezing him, and damping her dress and cheeks before loosing him.
She ran noiselessly upstairs and came back with a small jug of cold water from the kitchen. As seemingly he could not clasp the handle, she held the jug to his lips. He swallowed the water in large, eager gulps.
"Wait a bit now," she said, when he had drunk half of it, and pulled the jug away from him. After twenty or thirty seconds he drank the rest and sighed.
"Can you walk, Joe? Can you stand?"
He shook his head slowly.
"I dropped down giddy.... Door was unlatched. I came in out of the rain and dropped down giddy."
She ran upstairs again, lit her candle, and set it on the floor by her bedroom door. When she had descended once more she saw that the candle threw a very faint light all the way down the two flights of stairs to the back of the shop. She seized Joe in her arms—she was very strong from continual hard manual labour, and he was very thin—and carried him up to her room, and, because he was wet, put him on the floor there. Breathless for a minute, she brought in the candle and closed and locked the door. (She locked it against nobody, but she locked it.)