"I promise."
And then, as if satisfied, he fell asleep.
He slept all night peacefully. But Anne did not once lose consciousness. At dawn she left her sleepless couch, and dressed herself, moving about the room cautiously, so as not to awaken the sleeper below. When she was ready to go down, she paused a moment, thinking. Raising her eyes, she found herself standing by chance opposite the small mirror, and her gaze rested half unconsciously upon her own reflected image. She drew nearer, and leaning with folded arms upon the chest of drawers, looked at herself, as if striving to see something hitherto hidden.
We think we know our own faces, yet they are in reality less known to us than the countenances of our acquaintances, of our servants, even of our dogs. If any one will stand alone close to a mirror, and look intently at his own reflection for several minutes or longer, the impression produced on his mind will be extraordinary. At first it is nothing but his own well-known, perhaps well-worn, face that confronts him. Whatever there may be of novelty in the faces of others, there is certainly nothing of it here. So at least he believes. But after a while it grows strange. What do those eyes mean, meeting his so mysteriously and silently? Whose mouth is that? Whose brow? What vague suggestions of something stronger than he is, some dormant force which laughs him to scorn, are lurking behind that mask? In the outline of the features, the curve of the jaw and chin, perhaps he notes a suggested likeness to this or that animal of the lower class—a sign of some trait which he was not conscious he possessed. And then—those strange eyes! They are his own; nothing new; yet in their depths all sorts of mocking meanings seem to rise. The world, with all its associations, even his own history also, drops from him like a garment, and he is left alone, facing the problem of his own existence. It is the old riddle of the Sphinx.
Something of this passed through Anne's mind at that moment. She was too young to accept misery, to generalize on sorrow, to place herself among the large percentage of women to whom, in the great balance of population, a happy love is denied. She felt her own wretchedness acutely, unceasingly, while the man she loved was so near. She knew that she would leave him, that he would go back to Helen; that she would return to her hospital work and to Weston, and that that would be the end. There was not in her mind a thought of anything else. Yet this certainty did not prevent the two large slow tears that rose and welled over as she watched the eyes in the glass, watched them as though they were the eyes of some one else.
Diana's head now appeared, giving the morning bulletin: the captain had slept "like a cherrb," and was already "'mos' well." Anne went down by the outside stairway, and ate her breakfast under the trees not far from Mrs. Redd's out-door hearth. She told July that she should return to the hospital during the coming night, or, if the mountain path could not be traversed in the darkness, they must start at dawn.
"I don't think it's quite fair of you to quit so soon," objected Mrs. Redd, loath to lose her profit.
"If you can find any one to escort me, I will leave you Diana and July," answered Anne. "For myself, I can not stay longer."
July went in with the sick man's breakfast, but came forth again immediately. "He wants yo' to come, miss."
"I can not come now. If he eats his breakfast obediently, I will come in and see him later," said the nurse.