Inez answered with a fresh flood of tears. “Oh, Helen! Helen!” she murmured, clinging impulsively to her arm.
Helen’s recovery came much more spontaneously than did Inez’. With the one the pendulum had made a completed swing, and the depths at one extreme had been offset by the heights at the other. Inez, however, was hopelessly distraught by the accumulated weight of a multitude of emotions: the physical shock of the accident, the horror of the situation as it first burst upon her with unmitigated force, the involuntary tearing from her heart of the mask it had worn for so many months—and now the painful joy of the reaction. She rested in her chair, almost an inert mass, in total collapse of mind and body.
“I could not help it, Helen,” she murmured, piteously, as her friend pushed back the dishevelled hair from her hot forehead.
“Of course you could not, dear,” Helen cried, smiling through her tears of joy at the obvious relief her words gave. “Oh, I am so happy, Inez!”
Helen’s face grew pale again as her thoughts returned to those first awful moments, which now seemed so long ago. “I really thought him dead, Inez,” she continued, after a moment’s silence. “We could not have endured that, could we, dear? Now we will take him to the villa and nurse him back to health and strength. How strange it will seem to him not to be able to do things for himself!”
“Is he—badly hurt?” ventured Inez.
“The doctor can’t tell yet, but he feels encouraged.”
“Is he—conscious?”
“Not wholly—and the doctor says he will be delirious for days.”
“Oh,” replied Inez, again relaxing.