“Wilfrid—darling—what is it?”
“Nothing. I’m giddy. I—I think I’m going to be sick.”
He broke from her and dragged himself upstairs and shut himself into his study. That night his old single bed was brought back and made up there. He was afraid to sleep in the room that had been his mother’s.
V
He had run through all the physical sensations of his terror. What he felt now was the sharp, abominable torture of the mind.
If the dead knew—
The dead did know. She had come back to tell him that she knew. She knew that he thought of her with unkindness. She had been there when he talked about her to Effie. She knew the thought he had hidden even from himself. She knew that she had died because, secretly, he had wished her dead.
That was the meaning of her look and of her tears.
No fleshly eyes could have expressed such an intensity of suffering, of unfathomable grief. He thought: the pain of a discarnate spirit might be infinitely sharper than any earthly pain. It might be inexhaustible. Who was to say that it was not?
Yet could it—could even an immortal suffering—be sharper than the anguish he felt now? If only he had known what he was doing to her— If he had known. If he had known—