The nurse showed by a perfectly natural question her absolute unsuspicion of a fox under the cloak. "Had Lady Challis far to come?" For she must have been sent for—that saw itself.
"We don't know—I mean, we don't know where Lady Challis is. When Sir Alfred comes to himself, he will tell us.... Is he not speaking again?..." Yes, he was. Both listened. Judith was reflective a moment over what to do; then said: "Would you kindly knock at my father's door, and say we think Sir Alfred is coming to himself? Or tell James to tell him." The nurse thinks to herself: "More obvious, surely, for this young lady to hunt up her father, and leave the patient to me!" But Judith, seeing hesitation, suggests a motive. When Sir Alfred opens his eyes he may be alarmed to find himself alone with a professional nurse. Also, Judith is always authoritative.
She seemed half-frightened of the patient, left alone with him. Would not you, woman, who are reading this, have taken the hand of the man if you loved him? Did Judith love him? She did not take his hand. Do you find her inexplicable? She was not really so; it is only the story's want of skill that makes her seem so. Then, think of the conflict of feeling and motive under her circumstances.... However, let that wait!
Perhaps it was as well that she did not take his hand. Possibly what she did and said was safest, all things considered. She remained standing, immovable as a statue, by the bedside, and when his eyes opened and turned to her, more in inquiry than astonishment or alarm, said simply, "Well?" and waited for speech to come from him.
"Are you real?" said Challis. Her white, scared look and seeming shrinking from him grew more marked. His words, creepy and uncanny all the more that their speaker uttered them so equably, made her fear his reason had given way. Even those who have loved one demented will shrink from his insanity. But she kept her self-command, and replied with a voice under control:
"Scroop—do you not know me? I am Judith."
"Judith?"
"Yes—Judith Arkroyd. Do you not remember?"
"Judith Arkroyd—yes—a—oh yes!" There was an amiable air about him of a wish to be civil—an evasive acquiescence he might have shown to an attractive lady he had met in Society, and now met again and took the word of for her identity. He would talk a little, and something in the conversation would soon remind him whom he was speaking to. That sort of thing! His provisional pretence of recognition was more convincing a thousand times of his forgetfulness than any amount of denial of it would have been.
What could Judith do? Attack the position at once? Say to him: "Try to think! Try to recall all our love-passages of this year past! Remember the little garden in the moonlight, and your arms you found it so hard to restrain within the rules of good-breeding! Remember your mad, hot outburst, and your flight from an entichement you found insupportable; your quarrel with your wife; your troth-plight and mine; the tension of that Bill question. And last and most, or worst, that automobile and the man ahead, already as good as slain! Think of any of these things, and surely you will remember that this is I, Judith, that was to have been your wife!" All that this man must have forgotten, to forget her, rushed through Judith's mind, to take form in words should she nerve herself to utter it, or any choice from it. But the next thing he said clashed so ruthlessly with the last of her thought that speech on those lines was made hopeless.