I am."

"But she's ill. She cannot come. Wait till tomorrow, dear child. Rest is
what you need now. Take these few drops and go to sleep again, and you'll
not know yourself to-morrow."

"I don't know myself now," she repeated, glancing with slowly dilating
eyes at the medicine glass he proffered. "I can't take it," she
protested. "I forget now why, but I can't take anything more from a
glass. I've promised not to, I think. Take it away; it makes me feel
queer. Where is Adelaide?"

Her memory was defective. She could not seem to take in what the doctor
told her. But he tried her again. Once more he spoke of illness as the
cause of Adelaide's absence. Her attention wandered while he spoke of it.

"How it did hurt!" she cried. "But I didn't think much about it. I
thought only of--" Next moment her voice rose in a shriek, thin but
impetuous, and imbued with a note of excited feeling which made every
person there start. "There should be _two_," she cried. "_Two_! Why is
there only one?"

This sounded like raving. The doctor's face took on a look of concern,
and the nurse stirred uneasily.

"One is not enough! That is why Adelaide is not satisfied; why she does
not come and love and comfort me, as I expected her to. Tell her it is
not too late yet, not too late yet, not too late--"

The doctor's hand was on her forehead. This "not too late," whatever she
meant by it, was indescribably painful to the listeners, oppressed as
they were by the knowledge that Adelaide lay in her grave, and that all
fancies, all hopes, all meditated actions between these two were now, so
far as this world goes, forever at an end.

"Rest," came in Dr. Carpenter's most soothing tones. "Rest, my little
Carmel; forget everything and rest." He thought he knew the significance
of her revolt from the glass he had offered her. She remembered the scene
at the Cumberland dinner-table on that fatal night and shrank from
anything that reminded her of it. Ordering the medicine put in a cup, he
offered it to her again, and she drank it without question. As she
quieted under its influence, the disappointed listeners, now tip-toeing
carefully from the room, heard her murmur in final appeal:

"Cannot Adelaide spare one minute from--from her company downstairs, to
wish me health and kiss me good night?"

Was it weakness, or a settled inability to remember anything but that
which filled her own mind?

It proved to be a settled inability to take in any ne