“Oh! Isn’t that rather personal?”
“I hope not offensively.”
He went on to tell her, with even greater fulness than he had told the doctor. She listened with the interest women take in anything weird, and with a compassion for him which she did not conceal so perfectly but that he saw it. At the end he said: “You may wonder that I come to you with all this, which must sound like the ravings of a madman.”
“No—no,” she hesitated.
“I came because I wished you to know everything about me before—before—I wouldn’t have come, you’ll believe me, if I hadn’t had the doctor’s assurance that my trouble was merely a part of my being physically out of kilter, and had nothing to do with my sanity—Good Heavens! What am I saying? But the thought has tormented me so! And in the midst of it I’ve allowed myself to—Mrs. Yarrow, I love you. Don’t you know that?”
Alford may have had a divided mind in this declaration, but after that one word Mrs. Yarrow had no mind for anything else. He went on.
“I’m not only sick—so sick that I sha’n’t be able to do any work for a year at least—but I’m poor, so poor that I can’t afford to be sick.”
She lifted her eyes and looked at him, where she sat oddly aloof from those possessions of hers, to which she seemed so little related, and said, with a smile quivering at the corners of her pretty mouth, “I don’t see what that has to do with it.”
“What do you mean?” He stared at her hard.
“Am I in duplicate or triplicate, this time?”