Mrs. Norman looked away.
"I shall always be grateful to you," said Wilkinson. "You were very good to her."
"Oh, no, no," she moaned.
"I assure you," he insisted, "she felt it very much. I thought you would like to know that."
"Oh, yes." Mrs. Norman's voice went very low with the sinking of her heart.
"She used to say you did more for her—you and your sister, with her beautiful music—than all the doctors. You found the thing that eased her. I suppose you knew how ill she was—all the time? I mean before her last illness."
"I don't think," said she, "I did know."
His face, which had grown grave, brightened. "No? Well, you see, she was so plucky. Nobody could have known; I didn't always realize it myself."
Then he told her that for five years his wife had suffered from a nervous malady that made her subject to strange excitements and depressions.
"We fought it," he said, "together. Through it all, even on her worst days, she was always the same to me."