"Ah, Miss Chase! I do not know whether you should be glad or not. Is not this more cruel than death?"
"I do not understand," she faltered, uncomprehendingly; and he answered, with intense sympathy:
"You have spoken to him, and he does not know you—you, the dearest creature on earth to him, Miss Chase! Neither does he recognize any one else, nor remember anything. There is a bullet in his head that the doctors can not extricate, and it has destroyed his mental faculties completely. His health is good, but he has forgotten the past, and lost even the power of speech. He will never be anything, they say, but a harmless idiot."
She cried out with a terrible anger that it was not true, that she could not believe it; he was trying to deceive her and break her heart.
He was usually a quiet, stolid man, but the tears came to his eyes as she knelt on the floor and wound her arms about Love in passionate embraces, and, with tears that might have moved a heart made of stone, called on him to pity her and speak to her, his love, his Dainty, his true wife, whose heart was breaking for one tender word from his dear lips!
CHAPTER XXIX.
AS WE KISS THE DEAD.
Alas! nor words, nor tears, nor embraces, nor reproaches could move Love Ellsworth from his statue-like repose.
He suffered Dainty's caresses passively, but he did not return them, and his large, beautiful dark eyes dwelt on her face with the gentle calm of an infant whose intellect is not yet awakened.