'He is all yours then,' he said, with a wan smile. 'You have prevailed over evil.'
In a few days later his recovery had progressed so far that he had regained his usual tone and look; his wounds were healing, and his strength was returning. He seemed to the keen eyes of Greswold to have made a supreme effort to conquer the moral depression into which he had sunk, and to have thrust away his malady almost by force of will. As he grew better he never spoke of Egon Vàsàrhely.
On the fifteenth day from his accident he was restored enough to health for apprehension to cease. He passed some hours seated at an open window in his own room. He never asked if Vàsàrhely were still there or not.
Wanda, who never left him, wondered at that silence, but she forbore to bring forward a name which had had such power to agitate him. She was troubled at the nervousness which still remained to him. The opening of a door, the sound of a step, the entrance of a servant made him start and turn pale. When she spoke of it with anxiety to Herr Joachim, he said vague sentences as to the nervousness which was consequent on great loss of blood, and brought forward instances of soldiers who had lost their nerve from the same cause. It did not satisfy her. She was the descendant of a long line of warriors; she could not easily believe that her husband's intrepid and careless courage could have been shattered by a flesh wound.
'Did you really mean,' he said abruptly to her that afternoon, as he sat for the first time beside the open panes of the oriel; 'did you really mean that were I to die you would never forget me for any other?'
She rose quickly as if she had been stung, and her face flushed.
'Do I merit that doubt from you? she said. 'I think not.'
She spoke rather in sadness than in anger. He had hurt her, he could not anger her. He felt the rebuke.
'Even if I were dead, should I have all your life?' he murmured, in wonder at that priceless gift.
'You and your children,' she said gravely. 'Ah! what can death do against great love? Make its bands stronger perhaps, its power purer. Nothing else.'