"Your staying away has not served your purpose, then. My father came to me with the details, thinking to divert me for a moment from my physical pain; never supposing that each word was a dagger plunged into my very being. My mother came, with this scrap of news, or the other scrap. Mary came, wondering and eager, asking information at second-hand: mamma was mysterious over it, and would not tell her. Mary cannot credit ill of Anna: she has as great a trust in her still as I had. As I had! Oh, William! she was my object in life. She was all my future—my world—my heaven!"
"Now you know you will suffer for this excitement," cried William, almost as he would have said it to a wayward child.
He might as well have talked to the wind. Henry neither heard nor heeded him. He continued, his manner as full of agitation as his mind.
"I am not as other men. You can go forth, all of you, into the world, to your pleasures, your amusements. I am confined here. But what mattered it? Did I envy you? No. While I had her to think of, I was happier than you."
"Had this not happened, you might have been crossed in some other way, and so it would have come to the same thing."
"And now it is over," reiterated Henry, paying no attention to the remark. "It is over, and gone; and I—I wish, William, I had gone with it."
"I wish you would be reasonable."
"Don't preach. You active men, with your innumerable objects and interests in life, cannot know what it is for one like me, shut out from the world, to love. I tell you, William, it was literally my life; the core of my life; my all. I am not sure but that I have been mad ever since."
"I am not sure but that you are mad now," returned William, believing that to humour him might be the worst plan he could adopt.
"I dare say I am," was the unsatisfactory answer. "Four days, and I have had to bury it all within me! I could not wail it out to my own pillow at night; for they concluded it was one of my bad attacks, and old nurse was posted in the bed in the next room with the door open. There's no one I can rave to but you, and you must let me do it, unless you would have me go quite mad, I hope I shan't be here long to be a trouble to any of you."