here, when our
trials should be over, I would bring Nancy, and I found distraction
in choosing sites for a bungalow. In my soul hope flowered with little
watering. Uncertain news was good news. After two days of an impatience
all but intolerable, her first letter arrived, I learned that the
specialists had not been able to make a diagnosis, and I began to take
heart again. At times, she said, Ham was delirious and difficult to
manage; at other times he sank into a condition of coma; and again he
seemed to know her and Ralph, who had come up from Southampton, where he
had been spending the summer. One doctor thought that Ham's remarkable
vitality would pull him through, in spite of what his life had been.
The shock--as might have been surmised--had affected the brain.... The
letters that followed contained no additional news; she did not dwell
on the depressing reactions inevitable from the situation in which she
found herself--one so much worse than mine; she expressed a continual
longing for me; and yet I had trouble to convince myself that they
did not lack the note of reassurance for which I strained as I eagerly
scanned them--of reassurance that she had no intention of permitting her
husband's condition to interfere with that ultimate happiness on which
it seemed my existence depended. I tried to account for the absence
of this note by reflecting that the letters were of necessity brief,
hurriedly scratched off at odd moments; and a natural delicacy would
prevent her from referring to our future at such a time. They recorded
no change in Ham's condition save that the periods of coma had ceased.
The doctors were silent, awaiting the arrival in this country of a
certain New York specialist who was abroad. She spent most of her days
at the hospital, returning to the hotel at night exhausted: the people
she knew in the various resorts around Boston had been most kind,
sending her flowers, and calling when in town to inquire. At length came
the news that the New York doctor was home again; and coming to Boston.
In that letter was a sentence which rang like a cry in my ears: "Oh,
Hugh, I think these doctors know now what the trouble is, I think I
know. They are only waiting for Dr. Jameson to confirm it."

It was always an effort for me to control my impatience after the first
rattling was heard in the morning of the stage that brought the mail,
and I avoided the waiting group in front of the honeycombed partition of
boxe