THE MORNING.
They might hope? The night had passed, the morning had come, and she still lived.
You would hardly have thought so to look at her as she lay, deathly white, deathly still. But as the day broke she had awakened from a long sleep, the most natural and refreshing she had known for weeks, and looked up into the pale anxious face of Trix with the faint shadow of a smile. Then the eyelids swayed and closed in sleep once more, but she had recognized Trix for the first time in days—the crisis was over and hope had come.
They would not let her see him. Only while she slept would they allow him now to enter her room. But it was easily borne—Edith was not to die, and Heaven and his own grateful happy heart only knew how infinitely blessed he was in that knowledge. After the long bitter night—after the darkness and the pain, light and morning had come. Edith would live—all was said in that.
"There are some remedies that are either kill or cure in their action," the old doctor said, giving Charley a facetious poke. "Your marriage was one of them, young man. I thought it was Kill—it turns out it was Cure."
For many days no memory of the past returned to her, her existence was as the existence of a new-born babe, spent alternately in taking food and sleep. Food she took with eager avidity after her long starvation, and then sank back again into profound, refreshing slumber.
"Let her sleep," said the doctor, with a complacent nod; "the more the better. It's Nature's way of repairing damages."
There came a day at last when thought and recollection began to struggle back—when she had strength to lie awake and think. More than once Trix caught the dark eyes fixed in silent wistfulness upon her—a question in them her lips would not ask. But Miss Stuart guessed it, and one day spoke:
"What is it, Dithy?" she said; "you look as if you wanted to say something, you know."
"How—how long have I been sick?" was Edith's question.