Aloud he coldly replied:
"It is difficult to see where I could have been but here, this October."
Then the door opened, and the light showed her to him pale, with lips tight pressed from the pain of her injury. Instantly he forgot everything but his natural pity and chivalry towards women. He led her in, and half carried her upstairs. A little later she was resting on her bed, and he had done everything he could for her till the doctor should come. She seemed to have passed into an eclipse of temper or moodiness, and he got little gratitude.
The evening post brought her a letter which he took up to her himself. He knew the clear, rapid hand, and he knew, too, that Letty had received many such during the preceding month. He stood beside her a moment, almost on the point of asking her to let him see it. But the words died on his lips. And, perceiving that she would not read it while he was there, he went away again.
When he returned, carrying a new book and asking if he should read to her, he found her lying with her cheek on her hand, staring into the fire, and so white and miserable that his heart sank. Had he married her, a girl of twenty-four, only to destroy her chance of happiness altogether? A kind of terror seized him. He had been "good to her," so far as she and his business had allowed him, since their return; there had been very little outward jarring; but no one knew better than he that there had not been one truly frank or reconciling moment.
His own inner life during these weeks had passed in one obscure continuous struggle—a sort of dull fever of the soul. And she had simply held herself aloof from him.
He knelt down beside her, and laid his face against hers.
"Don't look so unhappy!" he said in a whisper, caressing her free hand. She did not answer or make any response till, as he got up again in a kind of despair as to what to do or say next, she hastily asked:
"Has the constable been up here to see you?"
He looked at her in surprise.