“I owe it to my wife—” the invalid continued; “but I shall come back—come back.”
“Yes, dear, you shall go back,” she answered, quietly, resting her cheek against his—“you shall go back.”
“When it is finished—” Armstrong murmured, again subsiding into silence.
So the days passed, one by one, differing little, each from the other, yet filled with many and conflicting emotions on the part of the faithful watcher by the bedside. With all its pain, Helen welcomed this period during which she could work out her problem with the unconscious help of the rambling, disconnected sentences which escaped from her husband’s lips. Sometimes they were full of tenderness for her; again they were reproaches, levelled at himself for his neglect; but most frequently they made reference to his work in some of its various stages. Alternately her heart was touched by his apparent affection for her, and the wound again torn open by his appeal to or dependence upon Inez. But through it all came the one conviction, which needed but this strengthening reassurance to make her determined path seem certain—that whatever drew him away from his work and back to her was a sense of duty, and that alone.
Helen questioned Dr. Montgomery upon the ordinary phenomena in cases such as this.
“His mutterings may be absolutely meaningless,” he replied to her questions, “or they may be thoughts or actual repetitions of conversations which he has previously had.”
“In the latter case, would he be likely to repeat them correctly?”
“Yes, provided he repeats them at all.”
“And these thoughts or conversations, if correctly repeated, would presumably indicate his convictions at the time they occurred?”
“His convictions at the time they occurred,” Dr. Montgomery assented; “but their reliability as normal expressions would depend upon his mental condition at the time the thoughts occurred or the words were spoken.”