“I will tell you. I got a letter from him a few days ago, saying he was going to France, and if I pleased, he could take a letter from me to you, and let me see you, if I was anxious, as he used to let me see—my mother. I had only to say yes, and he would come down to Plymouth. I hated him for deceiving me and bringing me to England, but he declared in his letter that was my mother’s doing. And I was so hungry for some news of you that I wrote Yes, he might come. Then I could not keep still for impatience: he telegraphed to me to meet the train he came by, and I went to the station, and when I found he hadn’t come by it, I described him to the guard, and he said a dark gentleman like that had left the train two stations before. There’s a big boy at the house where I’m staying who does whatever I like, and I had made him come to the station because I was afraid of meeting Rahas alone. And I told him to take tickets for him and me, and we went back by the next train to the station where Rahas got out. The porter said two gentlemen had got out and gone across the fields; and I knew who the other one was, and I screamed, and told William my husband had come back. But he said it was a fancy. We walked across the wet fields in the dark, and I was trembling so that I could scarcely stumble along, and William carried a lantern, and said I had better go back, for we were on a wild-goose chase. And when we came down to the wood, my foot slipped, and I fell on to the grass, and as he stooped to pick me up, William saw marks on the ground, as if something had been pulled along over it. He went a little way slowly until I heard him give a cry, and I ran to him, and—and we found you.”
She could not say more, her voice was suffocated, her lips were shaking. But the whitewashed walls of the room in which he was lying, the hayrick he could see through the window, told George that it was to a farmhouse he had been brought; and there they spent two days, until he was well enough to get up and go with Nouna back to her friends in Plymouth. Then began for them both in the pretty southern town a new and sweeter honeymoon, marred only for each by a secret fear for the other. In the first days of their re-union happiness gave their wasted frames a new vitality which made each feel on the high road to health, but which made to each only the more evident the pale face and heavy breathing of the other.
They were sitting together in the sunlight one May afternoon, the window wide open, the breeze coming in straight from the sea, drinking in the joy of each other’s presence as they were never tired of doing, when George passed his hand slowly down his wife’s cheeks, and shivered.
“Are you cold?” she asked anxiously, nestling up to him and putting her little arms round him as if to protect him from the spring air.
“No,” he said in a troubled voice, “I’m all right. But I’m afraid this place doesn’t suit you, Nouna; you’re getting so thin and white. You are paler than when I came back.”
Nouna’s face changed; after a moment’s pause she sprang up with her old vivacity, and running to a looking-glass, gazed at her own reflection for some minutes, and then crept back to her husband’s side with a bright light in her eyes. As he looked at her inquiringly, she drew up the sleeve of his coat as far as she could, very gently, and then baring her own arm also, laid it beside his, and glanced up into his face with an odd, tender, yearning expression which, after a moment’s wonderment, opened his own dull eyes. For a few seconds neither spoke again. Then he snatched her into his arms and their eyes held each other’s for some minutes in an ecstasy of relief and gratitude. George had loved his wife better than his career, better than his own happiness. Nouna, since the fall of her first idol—her mother—had turned all her devotion to the husband who had cherished her so tenderly. Both, therefore, dreaded life without the other a thousand times worse than death, and when it dawned upon them that they were not to be parted again, there was no further sorrow possible for them in this world.
“George,” said Nouna at last, in a broken whisper, “if you had never met me you would have been much happier, for you would have married that good Ella and have got on in the world and become a great man.”
“Yes,” said he at once.
“Well, aren’t you sorry?”
“No.”