“I know I ought not, my dear,” said the unhappy little body, clinging to her young friend’s hand; “but they will come. It’s just as if I were being tempted by mocking spirits, which keep on pretending to open my eyes when the doctor is out.”
“Open your eyes, dear Mrs Bolter?” said Grey, who found relief for her own sore heart in trying to soothe another’s.
“Yes, my dear. I’m confessing quite openly to you now, my dear; but I know that you will never betray me. They seem to open my eyes to all sorts of things, and make me see the doctor, when he is called in to ladies, taking their bands and feeling their pulses; and oh, my dear, it is very dreadful to sit at home and think that your husband is holding some handsome woman’s hand and wrist, and feeling the beatings of her pulses, and perhaps all the time forgetting that he has a poor, anxious little wife at home thinking he is so long away!”
“When that same husband loves you very dearly, and is most likely longing to be back by your side,” said Grey, reproachfully.
“If one could only feel that,” said Mrs Bolter, “instead of being in such torture and misery, and wishing a hundred times a day that I had never listened to the doctor, and given up our quiet little home!”
“When you have come out to make his life so happy?” said Grey, smiling.
“I try to, my dear; but I can’t help thinking sometimes,” said the poor little woman, pathetically, “that his heart is more devoted to Solomon’s gold—”
“Oh, Mrs Bolter!”
“And apes.”
“My dear Mrs Bolter!”