Then, week by week, slowly, a little joy came to her, as she saw the gradual return of power to the paralysed body and clearness to the flooded brain. She wondered, when he would begin to remember, whether her face would recall to him their last interview, her cruelty, her repudiation.
At last she knew that he remembered. She dared not ask herself "How much?" It was borne in on her that it was this way that her punishment would come.
For, as he gradually recovered, his manner to her became more constrained; notwithstanding his helpless dependence on her. He was shy and humble; grateful for the things she did for him; grateful with a heart-rending, pitiful surprise. It was as if he had looked to come back to the heartless woman he had known, and was puzzled at finding another woman in her place.
As the weeks wore on, and her hands had less to do for him, she felt that his awakened spirit guarded itself from her, fenced itself more and more with that inviolable constraint. And she bowed her head to the punishment.
When he was well enough to be moved she took him to the south coast. There he recovered power rapidly. By the end of February he showed no trace of his terrible illness.
They were to return to Scale in the beginning of March.
Then, at their home-coming, she would know whether he remembered. There would be things that they would have to say to each other.
Sometimes she thought that she could never say them; that her life was secure only within some pure, charmed circle of inviolate silence; that her wisdom lay in simply trusting him to understand her. She could trust him. After all, she had been most marvellously "let off"; she had not had to pay the extreme penalty; she had been allowed, oh, divinely allowed, to prove her love for him. He could not doubt it now; it possessed her, body and soul; it was manifest to him in her eyes, and in her voice, and in the service of her hands.
And if he said nothing, surely it would mean that he, too, trusted her to understand.