The cloud was utterly lifted from all hearts except mine. My aunt and uncle looked at each other with swimming eyes. Edward tried to laugh and look gay, but broke down utterly, and took refuge in the library, where I found him lying on the floor, with his face buried in Annie's lounge.
I went home stupefied, bewildered. I could not sleep. A terror-stricken instinct told me that all was not right. But how should I know more than physician, mother, husband?
For ten days I saw my Annie every day for an hour. Her sweet, strange, gentle, steady look into my eyes when we first met always paralyzed me with fear, and yet I could not have told why. There was a fathomless serenity in her face which seemed to me super-human. She said very little. The doctor had forbidden her to talk. She slept the greater part of the time, but never allowed the baby to be moved from her arms while she was awake.
There was a divine ecstasy in her expression as she looked down into the little face; it never seemed like human motherhood.
One day Edward came to me and said,--
"Do you think Annie is so well as they say? I suppose they must know; but she looks to me as if she had died already, and it were only her glorified angel-body that lies in that bed?"
I could not speak to him. I knew then that he had seen the same thing that I had seen: if his strong, rather obtuse material nature had recognized it, what could so blind her mother and father and the doctor? I burst into tears and left him.
At the end of a week I saw a cloud on Dr. Fearing's face. As he left Annie's room one morning, he stopped me and said abruptly,--
"What does Annie talk about?"
"She hardly speaks at all," I said.