something sharper
still.

Tom groaned and tossed, and cursed himself, and soon passed into
delirium. Straightway his visions, animate with shame and confusion of
soul, were more distressing than even his ready tongue could have told.
Dead babies and ghastly women pursued him everywhere. His fever
increased. The cries of terror and dismay that he uttered reached the
ears of his wife, and were the first thing that roused her from her
lethargy. She rose from her bed, and, just able to crawl, began to do
what she could for him. If she could but get near enough to him, the
husband would yet be dearer than any child. She had him carried to the
bed, and thereafter took on the sofa what rest there was for her. To
and fro between bed and sofa she crept, let the landlady say what she
might, gave him all the food he could be got to take, cooled his
burning hands and head, and cried over him because she could not take
him on her lap like the baby that was gone. Once or twice, in a quieter
interval, he looked at her pitifully, and seemed about to speak; but
the back-surging fever carried far away the word of love for which she
listened so eagerly. The doctor came daily, but Tom grew worse, and
Letty could not get well.

CHAPTER XL.

GODFREY AND SEPIA.

When the Redmains went to Cornwall, Sepia was left at Durnmelling, in
the expectation of joining them in London within a fortnight at latest.
The illness of Mr. Redmain, however, caused her stay to be prolonged,
and she was worn out with _ennui_. The self she was so careful over was
not by any means good company: not seldom during her life had she found
herself capable of almost anything to get rid of it, short of suicide
or repentance. This autumn, at Durnmelling, she would even,
occasionally, with that object, when the weather was fine, go for a
solitary walk--a thing, I need not say, she hated in itself, though now
it was her forlorn hope, in the poor possibility of falling in with
some distraction. But the hope was not altogether a vague one; for was
there not a man somewhere underneath those chimneys she saw over the
roof of the laundry? She had never spoken to him, but Hesper and she
had often talked about him, and often watched him ride--never man more
to her mind. In her wanderings she had come upon the breach in the
ha-ha, and, clambering up, found herself on the forbidden ground of a
neighbor whom the family did not visit. To no such folly would Sepia be
a vic