"You say this; you believe it? Very well then, misconstrue what I did if you choose, torture me, doubt me!" she began fiercely. But suddenly her thoughts of the evening before returned to her. Something oppressive filled her breast and rose in her throat.
"But I do not doubt you," he said, checked by the intensity of anguish her features exhibited. He even put out his hand.
But seizing her head in both hands, she pushed by him and rushed upstairs.
Her door was not opened until the next morning; then Rachel, all wild and staring, threw it wide. A low fever had set in. Emily Short arrived with her fund of common sense and her knitting work (she was knitting comforters for her special charges among the children)—and stationed herself at the bedside.
What surprised them all was Rachel's prostration which continued long after the fever had left her. Turning her face to the wall, she seldom spoke. When her husband entered the room, she looked at him sometimes entreatingly, sometimes pityingly; one day, drawing his head down on her breast, she wept over him. Then she put him gently from her, and for a long time after, lay like one dead.
Often in the night, when Emily Short, thinking that at last she slept, bent over her, she discovered her lying rigid and still, with her face bathed in tears. One night in the third week of her illness, when Emily came to the bedside, Rachel looked up at her.
"How is it possible—" she whispered.
Emily bent lower, "How is what possible, dear?"
In the silence of the room the words were breathed rather than spoken, "—to stop loving?"
Emily gave a little start, she scratched her head with her crochet needle; then the work slipped to the floor and she hid her worn face.