“What is that? I am all attention.”
“May I trust you?”
“Absolutely.”
“It is about my husband. He is not well. He is troubled by a nervous ailment.”
Mrs. Tarbot looked watchful and eager. She no longer lay back in her chair; she sat upright, her thin hands were folded on her lap, the jewels with which her fingers were loaded shone in the firelight. Her eyes, filled with bold intentness, were fixed on Barbara’s white face. All the remarkable and gracious beauty of the young face was torture to the jealous heart of the other woman. She saw that a new development in her strange history was imminent, and roused herself, bracing every nerve to meet it. “Yes,” she said, “a nervous ailment. This is the age for such maladies. We live too fast, we put too much into our lives, nerves get overwrought, they give way. Our grandmothers vegetated, they did not know the meaning of nerves. A young man, rich, in the prime of youth, who has just married the girl he loves, ought not to suffer from nervous troubles.”
“My husband cannot get over the death of the child.”
“Ah!”
“He is haunted by strange fears in connection with that death.”
“What do you mean?”
“What I say, and I have come now to ask you to tell me frankly and fully, knowing that God is present and is listening to us, what the child really died of.”