"If nothing fresh would happen!"
"Why should anything fresh happen?"
She answers only indirectly;
"'Fear at my heart, as at a cup,
The life-blood seemed to sip.'
"Sometimes I think that Coleridge wrote those lines expressly for me." After a pause, in a voice of anxious asking: "She has not mentioned him to you lately, has she?"
"No."
"That is a good sign. Do not you think that that is a good sign? I think that she is getting better; do not you?"
For a moment he cannot answer, both because he is deeply touched by the confidence in him and his sympathy evidenced by her appeal, and for a yet more potent reason. Little she guesses how often, and with what heart-searchings and spirit-sinkings, he has put that question to himself.
"I do not know," he replies at last, with difficulty; "it is hard to judge."
"You have not told him that we are here?" in a quick, panic-struck tone, as of one smitten with a new and sharp apprehension.