Felicitas busied herself about his creature-comforts, acting on an impulse to pay off the gigantic debt she owed him with the small coin of little kindnesses and attentions. She prepared his sardines in his favourite way, cut him the thinnest bread-and-butter, and poured two spoonfuls of rum in his tea--a pick-me-up he was obliged sometimes to resort to. She put a cushion at his back, and drew the shade low over the lamp, so that his "poor tired eyes" should not be dazzled.
He watched her in painful amazement. He would have preferred satisfying his hunger to-night silently and unobserved, like a dog, and not to have been reminded that there were such things as dainty living and tit-bits in the world.
"How can she think of these trifling matters, when a few moments ago she was idling on the floor in despair?" he asked himself.
With a fine instinct she divined what was passing in his mind, and changing her tack, began again to give a harrowing account of her own sufferings.
"No, Ulrich," she said, "you can't conceive what torture it was to me to think of you alone at his grave: not to be there to help you, and stand by you. But it could not be helped. The doctor gave strict orders that I was not to attempt the journey; besides, I was very ill; a little more and you would not have found me alive."
She paused, expecting him to question her about the attempted suicide; but as he was silent she led the conversation round to it herself.
"Are you still angry with me, dearest?" she asked.
"Why should I be angry?"
"Because I acted so wickedly, and, in the first shock of my grief, doubted God and His mercy, so that I believed it was impossible to go on living. Ah, Ulrich, if you knew the state I was in then, you would, I am sure, forgive me."
"I have nothing to forgive, Felicitas."