The Woodlanders

"But it cannot be! He was well three days ago."

"Not well, I suspect. This seems like a secondary attack, which has

followed some previous illness--possibly typhoid--it may have been

months ago, or recently."

"Ah--he was not well--you are right. He was ill--he was ill when I

came."

There was nothing more to do or say. She crouched down at the side of

the bed, and Fitzpiers took a seat. Thus they remained in silence, and

long as it lasted she never turned her eyes, or apparently her

thoughts, at all to her husband. He occasionally murmured, with

automatic authority, some slight directions for alleviating the pain of

the dying man, which she mechanically obeyed, bending over him during

the intervals in silent tears.

Winterborne never recovered consciousness of what was passing; and that

he was going became soon perceptible also to her. In less than an hour

the delirium ceased; then there was an interval of somnolent

painlessness and soft breathing, at the end of which Winterborne passed

quietly away.

Then Fitzpiers broke the silence. "Have you lived here long?" said he.

Grace was wild with sorrow--with all that had befallen her--with the

cruelties that had attacked her--with life--with Heaven. She answered

at random. "Yes. By what right do you ask?"

"Don't think I claim any right," said Fitzpiers, sadly. "It is for you

to do and say what you choose. I admit, quite as much as you feel,

that I am a vagabond--a brute--not worthy to possess the smallest

fragment of you. But here I am, and I have happened to take sufficient

interest in you to make that inquiry."

"He is everything to me!" said Grace, hardly heeding her husband, and

laying her hand reverently on the dead man's eyelids, where she kept it

a long time, pressing down their lashes with gentle touches, as if she

were stroking a little bird.

He watched her a while, and then glanced round the chamber where his

eyes fell upon a few dressing necessaries that she had brought.

"Grace--if I may call you so," he said, "I have been already humiliated

almost to the depths. I have come back since you refused to join me

elsewhere--I have entered your father's house, and borne all that that

cost me without flinching, because I have felt that I deserved

humiliation. But is there a yet greater humiliation in store for me?

You say you have been living here--that he is everything to you. Am I

to draw from that the obvious, the extremest inference?"