“Come in,” cried she, apathetically.
It was Mr. Carlyle who entered. She rose up, her pulses quickening, her heart thumping against her side. In her wild confusion she was drawing forward a chair for him. He laid his hand upon it, and motioned her to her own.
“Mrs. Carlyle tells me that you have been speaking to her of leaving—that you find yourself too much out of health to continue with us.”
“Yes, sir,” she faintly replied, having a most imperfect notion of what she did say.
“What is it that you find to be the matter with you?”
“I—think—it is chiefly—weakness,” she stammered.
Her face had grown as gray as the walls. A dusky, livid sort of hue, not unlike William’s had worn the night of his death, and her voice sounded strangely hollow. It, the voice, struck Mr. Carlyle and awoke his fears.
“You cannot—you never can have caught William’s complaint, in your close attendance upon him?” he exclaimed, speaking in the impulse of the moment, as the idea flashed across him. “I have heard of such things.”
“Caught it from him?” she rejoined, carried away also by impulse. “It is more likely that he——”
She stopped herself just in time. “Inherited it from me,” had been the destined conclusion. In her alarm, she went off volubly, something to the effect that “it was no wonder she was ill: illness was natural to her family.”