"Anything in your mail?" she asked.
"I think not. You can look them over and see if I've missed anything. To a man in my disarticulate situation people don't write except to express the kindness of their hearts. Here's a letter from Mary designed to prevent me from worrying about her. Full of pleasant little anecdotes about farm life. It's thoroughly Arcadian, she says. A spot designed by Heaven for me to rusticate in this summer when—when we go back to town. Somehow, I never did inhabit Arcady. There's a letter from Martin Whitney, too, that's almost alarmingly encouraging in its insistence that I mustn't worry. If only they knew how little I did—these days!"
"Well, that's all right then," she said. "Because those were Doctor
Darby's orders. You weren't to be excited or worried about anything. But,
John, is it really true that you don't? Not about anything?"
The fact that her face was still turned away as she asked that question gave it a significance which could not be overlooked.
"It's perfectly true," he asserted. "I don't believe I could if I tried. But there's something evidently troubling you. Let's have it. Oh, don't be afraid. You've no idea what an—Olympian position one finds himself in when he has got half-way across the Styx and come back. Tell me about it."
"You know all about it already. I told you the first day you could talk—that I was going to give up singing altogether except just for you,—when you wanted me to. I knew I'd been torturing you about it. I thought perhaps you'd get well quicker,—want to get well more—if you knew that the torture wasn't to go on. It was true and it is true. Perhaps you thought it was just one of those lies that people tell invalids—one of those don't-worry things. Well, is wasn't.
"But you made me promise I wouldn't do anything—wouldn't break my Ravinia contract—until we could talk it all out together. Your temperature went up a little that afternoon and when Doctor Darby asked me why, I told him. He said I mustn't, on any account, speak again to you about it until you brought the subject up yourself. I don't know whether he'd call this bringing it up or not, but anyway that's it. I've kept my promise to you though," she concluded. "I haven't written. They still think I am going to sing this summer."
"I am very glad of that," he said quietly. "I thought the thing was settled by our first talk. I didn't realize that you had taken it merely as an—adjournment."
She was still turned rigidly away from him, but the grip of one of her hands upon the arm of a chair betrayed the excitement she was laboring under, while it showed the effort she was making to hold it down.
"I didn't think, though," he went on, "that that resolution of yours to give up your whole career,—make ducks and drakes of it, in obedience to my whim—was nothing more than one of those pious lies that invalids are fed upon. I knew you meant it, my dear. I knew you'd have done it—then—without a falter or a regret."