"Is there anything wrong, Clare? What is the matter with you, my darling little wife?"
Still she was silent, for her tongue clove to the roof of her mouth, and she could only sigh in her heart secretly.
"Oh, heaven—what am I to do? Avoid the temptation—flee the sin—yea, even confess all—ere it be too late!"
Then she thought of her husband's frigidity of manner, his intense sense of morality, religion, purity, and rectitude, and her timid heart died within her.
"God help us, child," said Cecil Thorne, "I hope that no illness has seized you."
He thought wildly over the several fever and cholera beds he had been beside of late, and the strong man felt his soul die within him with fear, as he saw alternately the wistfulness and wild excitement in his wife's eyes.
"A doctor must be summoned," he exclaimed; "qui hi—hollo, there, Chuttur Sing!"
"Oh, no, Cecil, dearest," said she, with something between a sob and a hysterical laugh; "it is only the heat that affects me—and the thunder," she added, as a peal went hustling through the sultry air overhead.
A storm came on; the rain fell in torrents, and Clare, while in the act of selecting the garments and necessaries she would have to take with her, and while carefully selecting and putting aside, for some other and worthier wife, it might be, the few jewels her husband's moderate means had enabled him to give her (Delhi bracelets of champac-work, and so forth), actually began to hope that, if the tempest of falling rain continued, the very flight for which she was preparing might be arrested, ere it was too late, and thus that her sore temptation might pass away!
The innocent words, the tender anxiety and trusting goodness of the man she was about to abandon and deceive, and the knowledge, that in time to come, there would be an amount of grief, shame, and sorrow for her, that would be known in its degree but to God and himself, wrung her heart, and filled her eyes with hot and blinding tears.