He sighed as he spoke, but the sigh broke off with a moaning sound. Mrs. Dundyke glanced at him. She had resumed her knitting—which was a chest protector for himself—until the wine that she had rung for should be brought.
"Robert, are you losing heart?"
"No, I can never lose that. There was a marriage, if we could only find out where. You would be as sure of it as I am, dear Mrs. Dundyke, had you known my mother."
Mrs. Dundyke made no rejoinder. For herself, she had never fully believed in the marriage at all, but she was not cruel enough to say so. She sat watching him over her knitting: now bending forward with his thin hands spread out to the warmth of the fire; now suddenly bringing his hands to his chest as he coughed, choked; now lying back in the chair, panting, his thin nostrils working, his breath coming in great gasps; and there came in that moment over Mrs. Dundyke as she looked, a conviction—she knew not whence or why—that a very, very short period would bring the end.
She felt her face grow moist with a cold moisture. How was it that she had been so blind to the obvious truth? She knitted two whole rows of knitting before she spoke, and then she told him, with a calm voice, that she should write for his wife.
"How kind you are!" he murmured. "I shall never repay you."
Mrs. Dundyke laughed cheerfully.
"I don't want repayment. There is nothing to repay."
"Nothing to repay! No kindly friendship, no trouble, no cost! I wonder how much I cost you in wine alone?"
"Robert," she said, in a low, earnest tone—though she wondered whether he might not be jesting—"do you know what they tell me my future income will be? Mr. Littelby was here to-day, giving me an account of things, for I put my poor husband's affairs into his hands on my return. It will not be much less than two thousand a year."