“No,” said Irene, as she slowly opened her eyes. “I won’t die. No, that would please him too well. He would be glad to come and find me dead, but I won’t die, I won’t die.”
“Why, how you talk; of course your husband don’t want you to die. Please lie down. You will get crazy if you talk in that way.”
“Has Max come yet?” she asked, when in the morning she awoke and found Mary sitting near her.
“No; but I think he will be here by breakfast time,” said Mary.
A cold fear shot through Irene’s heart.
The day passed, and still another, and Max did not come. Irene was growing extremely nervous. With constant watching and wishing she at last gave up in despair. She sent a message to her father, but at the end of a week she had received no word from him, and, lying there alone and unable to lift her head from her pillow, seemingly deserted by her father and the man who “could not live without her,” Irene Wilmer gave herself up to the bitterest reflections. She wept until the fountain of tears was entirely exhausted. She cursed the day that Max Brunswick ever crossed her path, to take her away from her home and a husband who would never have spoken a harsh word to her. She could look back now and see all that she had lost. She could see, now that disease had laid hold of her and held her down with hands which could not be defied, that she had lost the whole world. She tried to picture something brighter than the dark cloud she saw. She tried to fancy herself back in Scott’s home, and that she was living there an honored wife. Amid her vain fancies she fell asleep. She saw herself on a broad sea of deep and muddy waters, tossed up and down on the angry waves, and Scott standing with folded arms upon 244 a high and massive rock above. How like a god he seemed to her, as he stood there with his fine manly form outlined against the blue sky above, his auburn locks lifted from his noble brow by the breeze, and his searching eyes gazing down upon her. She reached out her hands, and called upon him to save her, but he closed his lips firmly, and still retaining his rigid position, he gazed at her as she floated away and went sinking down, down, down.
“Oh, Scott,” she moaned, as she sank below the surface, “save me, save me.”
“Why, who in the world are you calling for?” asked Mary. “Who is Scott? Why you must have been awfully choked, for you gasped two or three times as though you could hardly breathe.”
“I had a terrible dream, and I have such pain in my chest too.”