Her mind had been wandering, surely, when she had that fancy about Lostwithiel, he told himself. It was something more than a dream. And then he remembered those long nights of delirium after her boy was born—and above all, that one night, when she had fancied herself at sea in a storm, when she had tried to fling herself overboard. He knew now what scene she had re-acted in that delirium, what the vision was which a mind distraught had conjured out of empty darkness.
The priest left them before eleven o’clock, and Martin Disney sat with his wife till long after midnight—Tabitha waiting quietly in the next room—before he could persuade her to go to bed. Isola was more wakeful than usual—though her slumbers had been much broken of late—and there was a restlessness about her which impressed her husband as a sign of evil.
“Is the storm over?” she asked, by-and-by, with her face turned towards the loggia and the starlight above the garden.
“Yes, dearest, all is calm now.”
“And the boy?” she said, suddenly looking up at the ceiling above which the child slept with his nurse. “He is asleep, of course.”
“I hope so. I went upstairs at nine o’clock, while Father Rodwell was reading to you, and gave him my goodnight kiss. He was fast asleep.”
“I wonder whether he will ever think of me when he is a man?” she said musingly.
“Can you doubt that? You will be his most sacred memory.”
“Ah,” she replied, “he will never know——”
The sentence remained unfinished.