"It may be a night's job on 't, findin' of the body."
"The WHAT?"
The poor little sparrow dropped from Dr. Sharpe's hand. He took a step
backward, scanned our faces, sat down dizzily, and fell over upon the
sand.
He is a man of good nerves and great self-possession, but he fell like
a woman, and lay like the dead.
"It's no place for him," Hansom said, softly. "Get him home. Me and the
neighbors can do the rest. Get him home, and put his baby into his arms,
and shet the door, and go about your business."
I had left him in the dark on the office floor at last. Miss Dallas and
I sat in the cold parlor and looked at each other.
The fire was low and the lamp dull. The rain beat in an uncanny way upon
the windows. I never like to hear the rain upon the windows. I liked it
less than usual that night, and was just trying to brighten the fire a
little, when the front door blew open.
"Shut it, please," said I, between the jerks of my poker.
But Miss Dallas looked over her shoulder and shivered.
"Just look at that latch!" I looked at that latch.
It rose and fell in a feeble fluttering way,--was still for a
minute,--rose and fell again.
When the door swung in and Harrie--or the ghost of her--staggered into
the chilly room and fell down in a scarlet heap at my feet, Pauline
bounded against the wall with a scream which pierced into the dark
office where the Doctor lay with his face upon the floor.
It was long before we knew how it happened. Indeed, I suppose we have
never known it all. How she glided down, a little red wraith, through
the dusk and damp to her boat; how she tossed about, with some dim,
delirious idea of finding Myron on the ebbing waves; that she found
herself stranded and tangled at last in the long, matted grass of that
muddy cove, started to wade home, and sunk in the ugly ooze, held,
chilled, and scratched by the sharp grass, blinded and frightened by the
fog, and calling, as she thought of it, for help; that in the first
shallow wash of the flowing tide she must have struggled free, and found
her way home across the fields,--she can tell us, but she can tell no
more.
This very morning on which I write, an unknown man, imprisoned in the
same spot in the same way overnight, was found by George Hansom dead
there from exposure in the salt grass.
It was the walk home, and only that, which could have saved her.
Yet for many weeks we fought, her husband and I, hand to hand with
death, seeming to _see_ the life slip out of her, and watching for
wandering minutes when she might look upon us with sane eyes.
We kept her--just. A mere little wreck, with drawn lips, and great eyes,
and shattered nerves,--but we kept her.
I remember one night, when she had fallen into her first healthful nap,
that the Doctor came down to rest a few minutes in the parlor where I
sat alone. Pauline was washing the tea-things.
He began to pace the room with a weary abstracted look,--he was much
worn by watching,--and, seeing that he was in no mood for words, I took
up a book which lay upon the table. It chanced to be one of Alger's,
which somebody had lent to the Doctor before Harrie's illness; it was a
marked book, and I ran my eye over the pencilled passages. I recollect
having been struck with this one: "A man's best friend is a wife of good
sense and good heart, whom he loves and who loves him."
"You believe that?" said Myron, suddenly, behind my shoulder.
"I believe that a man's wife ought to be his best friend,--in every
sense of the word, his _best friend,_--or she ought never to be his
wife."
"And if--there will be differences of temperament, and--other things. If
you were a man now, for instance, Miss Hannah--"