“The storm has broken the wires but as soon as they are up, papa will send your mother word, so you needn’t worry about that. But we don’t either of us know your wife’s address. If you could tell us——”
She stopped. He had begun to frown and then shut his eyes with an expression of weariness.
“That doesn’t matter,” he said. “Don’t bother about it. Let her alone.”
Again there was one of those pauses which seemed to him so long. He gave a sigh and moved restlessly, and she said,
“Are your feet very painful?”
“Yes, pretty bad,” he answered. “What’s the matter with them?”
“They were frost-bitten, one partly frozen.”
“Oh—” he did not seem profoundly interested. It was as if they were some one else’s feet, only they hurt violently enough to obtrude themselves upon his attention. “Thank you very much,” he added. “I’ll be all right to-morrow.”
He felt very tired and heard, as in a dream, the rustle of her dress as she moved again. She said something about “supper” and “Mrs. Perley coming,” and the dark, enveloping sense of stupor from which he had come to life closed on him again.
Some time later on he emerged from it and saw another woman, stout and matronly, with sleekly-parted hair, and an apron girt about her. He asked her, too, who she was, for the fear that he might wake and find his wife by his bedside mingled with the pain of his feet, to torment him and break the vast, dead restfulness of the torpor in which he lay.