‘I need not ask you to be patient,’ he began quickly; ‘if I could possibly have spared you—if there had been anybody in the world to go to... I am in horrible, horrible trouble, Sheila. It is inconceivable. I said I was sane: so I am, but the fact is—I went out for a walk; it was rather stupid, perhaps, so soon: and I think I was taken ill, or something—my heart. A kind of fit, a nervous fit. Possibly I am a little unstrung, and it’s all, it’s mainly fancy: but I think, I can’t help thinking it has a little distorted—changed my face; everything, Sheila; except, of course, myself. Would you mind looking?’ He walked slowly and with face averted towards the dressing-table.
‘Simply a nervous—to make such a fuss, to scare!...’ began his wife, following him.
Without a word he took up the two old china candlesticks, and held them, one in each lank-fingered hand, before his face, and turned.
Lawford could see his wife—every tint and curve and line as distinctly as she could see him. Her cheeks never had much colour; now her whole face visibly darkened, from pallor to a dusky leaden grey, as she gazed. It was not an illusion then; not a miserable hallucination. The unbelievable, the inconceivable, had happened. He replaced the candles with trembling fingers and sat down.
‘Well,’ he said, ‘what is it really; what is it really, Sheila? What on earth are we to do?’
‘Is the door locked?’ she whispered. He nodded. With eyes fixed stirlessly on his face, Sheila unsteadily seated herself, a little out of the candlelight, in the shadow. Lawford rose and put the key of the door on his wife’s little rose-wood prayer-desk at her elbow, and deliberately sat down again.
‘You said “a fit”—where?’
‘I suppose—is—is it very different—hopeless? You will understand my being... O Sheila, what am I to do?’ His wife sat perfectly still, watching him with unflinching attention.
‘You gave me to understand—“a nervous fit”; where?’
Lawford took a deep breath, and quietly faced her again. ‘In the old churchyard, Widderstone; I was looking at—at the gravestones.’