"No; but do not worry about it. I am going back with you, and will stay until you are sound asleep. Do not try to explain your coming here. We will do that together later. I always want you near me; possibly when you were sleeping, you became sensitive to that thought. Come. You will be ill tomorrow."
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
The night's experience furnished William with still another problem to study, all the more perplexing because of the fact that Clarissa had come to him without his having concentrated upon her doing so, and apparently of her own will, while she had shrunk away, cold and unresponsive when he had tried to bring her. What was the power that had brought her to him? It must have been strong, although she had no remembrance of coming, nor of meeting Dinah.
Long after she was asleep, he weighed cause after cause; there was no disputing the fact he was becoming nervous, and, when her regular and low breathing proclaimed beyond all doubt she was sleeping sweetly and soundly, he would not move, nor leave her, fearing she might again rise and walk about in her sleep.
If she had come to him at almost any other time, he would not have been surprised, as she was so constantly in his mind; then he would have thought his silent suggestions, finding her negative, had drawn her to him, by the same law that a hypnotist draws a subject, but just at this particular time he had been very deeply engrossed in other thoughts.
According to his ideas, there was only one way to account for it; that was to ascribe it to her physical condition, making her negative and sensitive; possibly producing a state of somnambulance, and that he was in her mind in her dreaming, she had been guided to him by that strangely inexplicable, but none the less true instinct that guides all somnambulists if left unrestricted in their movements. This nervous state might last throughout the entire period of her pregnancy. At another time she might be drawn to Augustus, or any other person or place.
Persons have been known to drown themselves in such a state, so he would watch her. He knew somnambulance sprang from nervous excitement, and in her condition, there was no telling what phases might develop.
This had been a harmless and pleasing incident, but there was nothing to guarantee its repetition would be the same. It was not only his right, but his duty to watch over her while she was in this negative condition, for if harm should come to her, he could never forgive himself.