“Oh, have you been hurt? Have you been sick?” she pleaded, in a breaking voice, and made some unconscious movement toward him. He put out his hand, and would have caught one of hers, but she clasped them in each other.
“No, not I,—Dunham—”
“Oh!” said Lydia, as if this were not at all enough.
“He fell and struck his head, the night you left. I thought he would die.” Staniford reported his own diagnosis, not the doctor's; but he was perhaps in the right to do this. “I had made him go down to the wharf with me; I wanted to see you again, before you started, and I thought we might find you on the boat.” He could see her face relenting; her hands released each other. “He was delirious till yesterday. I couldn't leave him.”
“Oh, why didn't you write to me?” She ignored Dunham as completely as if he had never lived. “You knew that I—” Her voice died away, and her breast rose.
“I did write—”
“But how,—I never got it.”
“No,—it was not posted, through a cruel blunder. And then I thought—I got to thinking that you didn't care—”
“Oh,” said the girl. “Could you doubt me?”
“You doubted me,” said Staniford, seizing his advantage. “I brought the letter with me to prove my truth.” She did not look at him, but she took the letter, and ran it greedily into her pocket. “It's well I did so, since you don't believe my word.”