"Then I can go," she said.
The doctor looked at her gravely, not approvingly. But it was not as he supposed; she was not hard-hearted; but the woman! Leonard had written that his conscience and his honor demanded that he marry the woman. If he were to live, there was no place at his bedside for her, who had once been his wife.
"Mrs. Claghorn," said the doctor, "your companion, Miss—ah—Miss Cone, has informed me of the existing relations between you and your husband. As a stranger I can give no advice, can only tell you that the woman who has been his companion has left your husband forever."
"Left him to die!" she exclaimed.
"Precisely. It need not surprise you. It is barbarous; but such women are barbarous. I shall be surprised if one who has displayed so much magnanimity should fail now. Pardon me, Mrs. Claghorn, but your place is by your husband's side. One woman has basely left him to die. Should you leave him now, you repeat the act."
The doctor silently withdrew. Natalie sank into a chair. Her mind was confused. Her place by her husband's side! Had she then a husband? The scenes in which she had been an actor had numbed her faculties, strained by the long watch by the bedside she had left. A feeling of suffocation was stealing over her; instinctively she loosened her dress at the throat. The letter she had written to Mark fell upon the floor, and she sat staring at it, dumb.
It became evident that her husband, as all in the house believed him to be, would live. Over and over again the doctor congratulated her on the wonderful influence of her presence upon the sick man. Naturally, he was glad to have rescued a patient from the very jaws of death; and though, since he had learned more of her history from Tabitha Cone, he had slight sympathy for the man, yet he believed that even under the untoward circumstances existing, forgiveness and reconciliation was the course which promised most for future happiness.
"It is the best thing for her," he said to Tabitha. "She will withdraw the divorce proceedings and forgive him. She can never be happy unless she does."
Tabitha, though sure that she herself would never have forgiven her mariner under similar circumstances, which, however, she admitted were unthinkable in that connection, agreed with the physician.
"He will be long in getting well," said the physician; "if, indeed, he ever recovers completely. If he has the heart of a man he must appreciate what she has done for him; literally brought him back to life."