When the door swung in and Harrie—or the ghost of her—staggered into the chilly room and fell down in a scarlet heap at my feet, Pauline bounded against the wall with a scream which pierced into the dark office where the Doctor lay with his face upon the floor.
It was long before we knew how it happened. Indeed, I suppose we have never known it all. How she glided down, a little red wraith, through the dusk and damp to her boat; how she tossed about, with some dim, delirious idea of finding Myron on the ebbing waves; that she found herself stranded and tangled at last in the long, matted grass of that muddy cove, started to wade home, and sunk in the ugly ooze, held, chilled, and scratched by the sharp grass, blinded and frightened by the fog, and calling, as she thought of it, for help; that in the first shallow wash of the flowing tide she must have struggled free, and found her way home across the fields,—she can tell us, but she can tell no more.
This very morning on which I write, an unknown man, imprisoned in the same spot in the same way overnight, was found by George Hansom dead there from exposure in the salt grass.
It was the walk home, and only that, which could have saved her.
Yet for many weeks we fought, her husband and I, hand to hand with death, seeming to see the life slip out of her, and watching for wandering minutes when she might look upon us with sane eyes.
We kept her—just. A mere little wreck, with drawn lips, and great eyes, and shattered nerves,—but we kept her.
I remember one night, when she had fallen into her first healthful nap, that the Doctor came down to rest a few minutes in the parlor where I sat alone. Pauline was washing the tea-things.
He began to pace the room with a weary abstracted look,—he was much worn by watching,—and, seeing that he was in no mood for words, I took up a book which lay upon the table. It chanced to be one of Alger's, which somebody had lent to the Doctor before Harrie's illness; it was a marked book, and I ran my eye over the pencilled passages. I recollect having been struck with this one: "A man's best friend is a wife of good sense and good heart, whom he loves and who loves him."
"You believe that?" said Myron, suddenly, behind my shoulder.
"I believe that a man's wife ought to be his best friend,—in every sense of the word, his best friend,—or she ought never to be his wife."