For the first few moments Audrey had no inclination to utter a sound. She was too much taken by surprise, too bewildered, too horror-stricken, even to cry out.
Her tongue, her brain, her limbs seemed paralysed, and she could do nothing but press her face forward between the little branches of the shrubs which concealed her from Gerard’s sight, and keep her hungry eyes fixed on his pale face.
Was it really he? Could it be he? His sentence had been one of years, and scarcely four months had passed since he was taken from her.
Surely he would never have been released without her hearing a word about it! Surely, surely in such a few weeks he could not have been transformed from the merry, bright, vigorous young fellow, full of life and high spirits, overwhelmed with melancholy of the most tempestuous sort, into this shadow, this lifeless, colourless framework of a man!
He lay so still in the lounge-chair, without even moving his lips to answer the nurse as she leaned over him and talked to him, that Audrey had a horrible spasm of fear that he was dead, that the feeble remnant of life had passed away even while she watched him with agonised eyes from her place of concealment not thirty yards away.
And she pressed farther forward, straining her eyes, and in so doing disturbed the bushes just sufficiently for the moving branches to catch the eye of the nurse, who was a tall, muscular, grey-haired woman, with a firm, pleasant face.
Gerard himself, on a much lower level than she, neither heard nor saw the movement. The nurse looked apprehensively at the bushes, and descried the woman behind them. Audrey saw that her face changed, and knew that she was alarmed lest her patient should be disturbed by some sudden and startling intrusion.
But she need not have been afraid. Audrey loved her husband too well not to have the right and safe instinct that caution was necessary when dealing with a man who was evidently so ill. She knew that to burst out upon him abruptly, without a word of warning, would be a rash, perhaps a fatal thing. And she held her own emotions in check, even while her heart yearned towards him, and her arms tingled with the longing to take his poor head in her arms and to hug it to her breast.
The nurse, meanwhile, not knowing all that was passing in the mind of the other woman, and guessing only that there was trouble in store, at once took steps to remove her charge out of harm’s way.
Audrey could not hear what she said, but knew that she was suggesting that he should go indoors. For a few moments he seemed to pay no heed to her words, but presently, with a petulant frown, as if loth to be disturbed, he allowed her to help him to his feet, and went slowly, leaning on her strong arm, in the direction of the angle of the house, round which they both disappeared.