The absence in her of any appeal for pity moved him far more than the loudest outcry could have done.
"Poor girl!" he said, and stopped in terror, lest he had obtruded the personal element into a situation which seemed so devoid of feeling.
"It was a pity," she returned to his surprise very quietly; and without looking at him, she spoke presently in a voice which struck him as having a strange quality of hollowness, "it was a pity; but it can't be helped. You might try and try because you're made that way, but it wouldn't, in the end, do the very least bit of good. If I live till to-morrow and get well and come out of the hospital, it will all be over just exactly what it was before. Not at first, perhaps—oh, I know, not at first!—but afterward, when things bored me, the taste would come back again."
"Hush!" he said quickly, with a forward movement, "hush! you shall not think such things!"
"The taste would come back again!" she repeated, with a kind of savage sternness. "I am not strong and the doctor told me long ago that there was no cure."
"Then he lied—there is always a cure."
"There is not—there is not," she insisted harshly, dwelling upon the words because in them she found a keen agony which relieved her lethargy of bitterness, "I am different now for a while, but it would not last. I am very tired, but after I have rested—"
"What would not last?" he broke in, as she hesitated over her unfinished sentence.
For a long pause she waited, searching in vain, he saw, for some phrase which might describe the thing she had not as yet thought out clearly in her own dazed mind. Then, at last, she spoke almost in a whisper, "the freedom."
The word gave him a sudden shock of gladness. "Then you are free to-day—you feel it now?"