"Why, Margarita!" I cried—and that is all the comment I ever made.
"That was what I wanted to tell him when he did not know me," she explained. "I—I was going to tell him the night—the night it happened."
"And does he know it now?"
"Of course. That is why he got well," she said promptly.
And do you know, I'm not sure she was wrong? That life was killing him—I mean it ran across his instincts and feeling and beliefs, every way.
There was no doubt she meant it. She never referred to the subject again.
He wanted her to see somebody else about her throat, but she absolutely refused to leave the Island till he was out of bed—Sarah came on with the baby two weeks later—and they sat by him all day nearly, the two of them, and he hardly let go her hand. He had changed a great deal in one way—his hair was quite silvered. But it was very becoming.
I didn't leave till I saw him in a dressing-gown in a long chair by the fire. Harriet went back to her hospital, and when Roger was up to it they went South for a bit before he began to work again.
The day before I left he did an odd thing—one of the two or three impractical, sentimental things I ever knew him to do in his life. He asked me to bring him his history of Napoleon—it had been packed into their luggage by mistake—and deliberately laid it on the heart of the fire! I cried out and leaned forward to snatch it—to think of the labour it represented!—but he put his hand on my arm.
"Don't, Jerry—I hate every page of it!" he said.