With a strong effort, a quick, nervous movement, she recovered herself. She felt a wild impulse to fly from the room, from the house, but most of all from herself.
Pauline was by her side, with her cool hand on her forehead.
"What is it, Evelyn?" she asked. "Are you ill?"
"Only a spell of giddiness, I think, and my head feels badly. I will go to my room and lie down for a time."
CHAPTER IV
SHADOWS AT THE PARSONAGE
Mr. Thorpe was called to his old home by the death of his brother. This brother had gone to California the year before for his health, had died there and was brought home for burial.
During their school days and college life, spent together, the boys had been very near to each other. There was a bond between them other than the bond of blood. A similarity of tastes and ambitions had brought about a congeniality and comradeship such as many times fails to develop between the offspring of the same parents. Both men had studied for the ministry and entered into the work at about the same time. But when George, the elder, was in the prime of his manhood a fatal malady had fixed itself upon him; a malady inherited, it was said, from his mother, who had laid down her burdens in the prime of her womanhood.
It was now nearly two years since Maurice Thorpe with his bride had left the home of his youth. It was a sad return. Among familiar scenes, old memories, well remembered faces, he bowed his head in grief and sorrow, and saw the clods close in upon the narrow earth-bed of this loved one, this gentle man of God, whose life had been dedicated to humanity. Something valued, something prized and loved was gone from life. Whatever the years might hold hereafter, this dear one was gone; his God had taken him. But there were no doubts or sacrilegious questionings in Mr. Thorpe's mind. His God was his sovereign, supreme of will, infallible in justice. Nor did the thought ever penetrate the well-kept fabric of his belief that there could be aught of ignorance in his conception of God; or that the Infinite in its length and breadth and depths was not wholly within the compass of his vision.
When he returned home, the marks of his grief were upon him, and Pauline believed that she detected a change in his health. His somewhat slender figure seemed more spare, his shoulders a trifle more stooped, and his chest contracted. Alarming symptoms, these. She had seen the first approach of the malady in his brother's case, and she could not mistake its advances. She took it upon herself to see that Maurice took proper care of himself. He was not allowed to sit in a draught, nor to go out unless properly protected from damp and cold. At the slightest alarm, a cough or failing appetite, she was ready with remedies and decoctions calculated to guard against and ward off all forms of the dread disease that was always pictured in her mind.