"You--you--" His voice failed in a terrible whisper. ...
In the succeeding days Kells did not often speak. His recovery was
slow--a matter of doubt. Nothing was any plainer than the fact that
if Joan had left him he would not have lived long. She knew it. And
he knew it. When he was awake, and she came to him, a mournful and
beautiful smile lit his eyes. The sight of her apparently hurt him
and uplifted him. But he slept twenty hours out of every day, and
while he slept he did not need Joan.
She came to know the meaning of solitude. There were days when she
did not hear the sound of her own voice. A habit of silence, one of
the significant forces of solitude, had grown upon her. Daily she
thought less and felt more. For hours she did nothing. When she
roused herself, compelled herself to think of these encompassing
peaks of the lonely canon walls, the stately trees, all those
eternally silent and changless features of her solitude, she hated
them with a blind and unreasoning passion. She hated them because
she was losing her love for them, because they were becoming a part
of her, because they were fixed and content and passionless. She
liked to sit in the sun, feel its warmth, see its brightness; and
sometimes she almost forgot to go back to her patient. She fought at
times against an insidious change--a growing older--a going
backward; at other times she drifted through hours that seemed quiet
and golden, in which nothing happened. And by and by when she
realized that the drifting hours were gradually swallowing up the
restless and active hours, then strangely, she remembered Jim Cleve.
Memory of him came to save her. She dreamed of him during the long,
lonely, solemn days, and in the dark, silent climax of unbearable
solitude--the night. She remembered his kisses, forgot her anger and
shame, accepted the sweetness of their meaning, and so in the
interminable hours of her solitude she dreamed herself into love for
him.
Joan kept some record of days, until three weeks or thereabout
passed, and then she lost track of time. It dragged along, yet
looked at as the past, it seemed to have sped swiftly. The change in
her, the growing old, the revelation and responsibility of serf, as
a woman, made this experience appear to have extended over months.
Kells slowly became convalescent and then he had a relapse.
Something happened, the nature of which Joan could not tell, and he
almost died. There were days when his life hung in the balance, when
he could not talk; and then came a perceptible turn for the better.