“Why don’t you speak?”
“Keeping something back,” he said hoarsely. “No!”
“No? Why do you say that? You seem so confused and changed. Tell me, for heaven’s sake; my father—”
“Better—better,” he said, recovering himself, and speaking loudly, but in a husky voice. “I—I have been a little drowsy, I suppose, with the long watching. Not correct, but natural.”
She looked at him wonderingly, he seemed so strange, and unable to contain herself, she turned to where her father lay, with her heart throbbing wildly, and something seemed to whisper to her the words, “He is dead.”
Volume One—Chapter Seven.
Sarah Woodham’s Vow.
It was after many hours of stupor, and when Doctor Asher, the physician of Danmouth, had gone back to the Fort, from a hurried visit to his injured patient, that Isaac Woodham unclosed his eyes, and lay gazing at the pale, agony-drawn face of his wife, upon which the light of the solitary candle fell.