I, too, could see that Julianna’s left arm was hanging by her side, and as she pulled up the panting mare below the porch, I noticed that her lips were white.
“I’m sorry to have forced your animal,” she said, “but I was in a hurry to get back. Jerry! Please hurry. Help me off.”
“What’s the matter?” cried our host behind me.
“To tell the truth,” she said. “I have had my arm broken.”
“Thrown?” cried Tencort, looking for signs of mud or dust on her costume.
Julianna smiled gamely.
“That is a matter wholly between myself and the mare,” she answered.
You know, of course, that in spite of her unconcerned answers the thing was serious. The great trouble, I have always thought, was that no good surgeon was within reaching distance; the country doctor who set the bones failed to discover the presence of some splinters at the elbow, which the injury had thrust up into and displaced some of the nerves and sinew there.
When we had come back home and Nederlinck, the surgeon, had discovered how the healing process had gone on, he told me that for many weeks my wife would have to suffer great pain from the readjustment of the irritated nerves. For two months he did what little he could and then left the rest to time.
Julianna suffered silently. She complained little, but I could see a marked change in her. She became restless. I have seen her pace up and down a room for hours, like a captured animal longing for the jungle, and remain at the dinner-table, after the time had come to go to our library for coffee, with her great round eyes staring before her until some one spoke to her. Her vigor disappeared. The moods which had followed the reading of the post-mortem message from the Judge returned; her little exhibits of affection and, I think, even her innocence of personality disappeared. The spectre, whatever it was, seemed present once more. At times I believed I saw in her beautiful face a look of guilt, of fear—the look of a soul in a panic. She became suspicious of her friends and withdrew from them more and more, at times with such awkward haste that it seemed as if she believed they were about to observe some fact which she must, at any cost, hide. Little by little, too, I believed that I detected signs that she was drawing away from me.