“It is hard to tell!”
He felt like breaking down and confessing all his secret to the sympathetic woman at his side, but prudence restrained his confidence.
She might laugh at him, and in his present nervous tension he could not bear it.
He had tried an experiment, and it had succeeded beyond all his hopes. He gazed at Eva longingly, trying to keep the sparkling lovelight out of his face.
Doctor Bertrand actually stooped and kissed the mad girl’s smiling face, carried out of her usual self-possessed pose by true, womanly sympathy; but she did not guess how Doctor Rupert envied the caress, and she said tenderly:
“I am glad your lover has written to you at last, Eva, and I hope you will get another letter to-morrow.”
“I shall be sure to look again on the window sill,” answered the happy girl; then she would not take any more notice of them, nor answer a word. She sat dreaming over the verses all day, with a tender, wistful light in her great dark eyes, as if trying to piece together some scattered links of memory.
As they turned away Doctor Rupert said, low and earnestly:
“The incident turned out so happily, would it be wise to repeat it?”
“By all means try it again. But let me have the verses, and I will humor her fancy by placing them on her window sill. I declare I am quite excited and hopeful. What if we have stumbled on the key to unlock her darkened mind to the light of reason?”