Though surprised, I was not confounded by his presence. Under the policy which I had resolved upon, I received him with the usual professions of kindness, and a manner as nearly warm and natural as the exercise of habitual art could make it. He certainly did look very miserable. His features wore an expression of uniform despair. They brightened up, when he beheld my wife, as the cloud brightens suddenly beneath the moonlight. His eyes were riveted upon her. He was almost speechless, but he advanced and took her hand, which I observed was scarcely extended to him. He sat the evening with us, and a chilly, dull evening it was. He himself spoke little—my wife less; and the conversation, such as it was, was carried on chiefly between old Mrs. Porterfield and myself. But I could see that Edgerton employed his eyes in a manner which fully compensated for the silence of his tongue. They were seldom withdrawn from the quarter of the apartment in which my wife sat. When withdrawn, it was but for an instant, and they soon again reverted to the spot. He had certainly acquired a degree of boldness, which, in this respect, he had not before possessed. I keenly analyzed his looks without provoking his attention. It was not possible for me to mistake the unreserved admiration that his glance expressed. There was a strange spiritual expression in his eyes, which was painful to the spectator. It was that fearful sign which the soul invariably makes when it begins to exert itself at the expense of the shell which contains it. It was the sign of death already written. But he might linger for months. His cough did not seem to me oppressive. The flush was not so obvious upon his cheek. Perhaps, looking through the medium of my peculiar feelings, his condition was not half so apparent as his designs. At least, I felt my sympathies in his behalf—small as they were before—become feebler with every moment of his stay that night.
“Edgerton does not appear to me to look so badly,” I said to Julia, after his departure for the evening.
“I don't know,” she answered; “he looks very pale and miserable.”
“Quite interesting!” I added, with a smile which might have been a sneer.
“Painfully so. He can not last very long—his cough is very troublesome.”
“Indeed! I scarcely heard it. He is certainly a very fine-looking fellow still, consumption or no consumption.”
She was silent.
“A very graceful fellow: very generous and with accomplishments such as are possessed by few. I have often envied him his person and accomplishments.”
“You!” she exclaimed, with something like an expression of incredulity.
“Yes!—that is to say, when I was a youth, and when I thought more of commending myself to your eyes, than of anything besides.”