“Hugh, you kill me! You madden me! Have you no pity? I believe you think you will make me do it!” she exclaimed, starting up and pacing the floor rapidly. “I do believe you fancy that you will make me give up this estate by asserting confidently that I will do it.”
“I think your true nobility of soul will constrain you to it.”
Suddenly she stopped, threw both hands to her breast, and turned so ghastly pale that Dr. Hutton sprang to her side, exclaiming:
“Garnet, you are ill! Is it possible that this struggle produces such an effect upon you?”
She dropped her hands from her bosom, her color returned, and, smiling strangely, she said:
“Why, Hugh, do you fancy that I am such a spoiled child as to grow ill because I want to have my own way in all things? No! But as I hurried up and down the room in such a heat I was arrested suddenly by a quick, sharp pang; a deathly pang, that caught away my breath. It seemed to me as if another movement would have been fatal; it seemed as if in the very flow of my high tide of life and audacity the skeleton fingers of death had closed around my heart and squeezed it. It is gone now. Nay, now, nonsense, Hugh! Do not look at me with such a death-warrant in your eyes. If you look at your patients that way you will frighten them to death!” she said, laughing.
“Garnet, sit down. There—give me your wrist. Did you ever experience this symptom before?”
“Symptom! Bless you, Dr. Hutton, it is not a symptom. Dr. Hutton, if you are out of practice and wish to get your hand in again, I refer you to all the hypochondriacal old men and women on the plantation, who will delight your professional heart with ‘symptoms’ for any length of time.”
“Garnet, you have been too much agitated to-day, for one of your excitable temperament. Go to rest.”
“I will. I feel, for the first time in my life, a little exhausted,” she replied, rising and extending her hand.