Once she bade them bring her pens and ink, and she began to use them. Then she laid them down, and tore in two an unfinished letter. 'Only cowards write to save themselves from pain,' she thought, and on the tenth day after she had risen from her bed she said to Greswold:
'Tell the women to leave me alone, and ask—my husband—to come here.'
She said the last words as if they choked her in their utterance. Her husband he was; nothing could change the past.
The old man hesitated, and ventured to suggest that any exertion was dangerous; would it be wise, he asked, to speak of what might agitate her? And thereon he paused and stammered, knowing that it was not his place to have observed that there was any estrangement between them.
She looked at him with suspicion.
'Have I spoken in my sleep or in my unconsciousness?' she thought.
Aloud she said only:
'Be so good as to go to him at once.'
He bowed and went, and to himself mused:
'Since she loves him, her heart will melt when she meets his eyes. His sin after all cannot be beyond those which women have forgiven a million times over since first creation began.'