"If you asked me to love him, I would try to love him," she answered submissively, her lips tremulous, her eyes downcast.
"That would make me jealous. I only want you to be courteous. Return to him now, show him over the grounds, and justify my great love for you by letting him see how sweet you can be."
She gave me a long look and returned to the drawing-room.
When afterwards I went downstairs I stood at the window watching them before I entered the grounds. They were traversing a broad walk. She looked incessantly towards the house; but sometimes she would loiter with an air of strange abandon, or bend to pick a flower and follow her companion with a bound.
Alas! I did not need Dr. F—— to confirm my fears. There was not a look, a remark, even an attitude of hers, that did not now insinuate derangement. How she loved me! Those earnest glances at the house were for me. Pitiful it was to think on such a passion corrupted by madness. What a sorrowful pageant her beauty, her devotion, her innocence made! It was the Dance of Death; the graces marshalled by a skeleton. Was I worthy of her love? Yes, for I loved her well, too. She must have known it, to have been so fond of me. Instinct in this stood her in the place of reason. She loved me with her spirit; she recognised my love by the faculties of her spirit. Had her brain interpreted her experiences her devotion must have been less deep.
CHAPTER IX.
That night Dr. F—— and I sat in the library. Geraldine had retired to rest. Up to that moment we had found no opportunity for conversation, for she was always near, always at my side.
I had marked his incessant study of her. I had admired the skill with which he directed her attention—as a steersman directs his bark; provoking her into speech, perplexing her views to ascertain the consistency of her mind, then helping her thoughts, to witness whether her incoherence were due to normal weakness of intellect or to disease.