journey--to out-of-the-way places--to study
something about cotton growing--my message has just overtaken him,"
Justine explained.

Bessy lay still, her breast straining for breath. She remained so long
without speaking that Justine began to think she was falling back into
the somnolent state that intervened between her moments of complete
consciousness. But at length she lifted her lids again, and her lips
stirred.

"He will be...long...coming?"

"Some days."

"How...many?"

"We can't tell yet."

Silence again. Bessy's features seemed to shrink into a kind of waxen
quietude--as though her face were seen under clear water, a long way
down. And then, as she lay thus, without sound or movement, two tears
forced themselves through her lashes and rolled down her cheeks.

Justine, bending close, wiped them away. "Bessy--"

The wet lashes were raised--an anguished look met her gaze.

"I--I can't bear it...."

"What, dear?"

"The pain.... Shan't I die...before?"

"You may get well, Bessy."

Justine felt her hand quiver. "Walk again...?"

"Perhaps...not that."

"_This?_ I can't bear it...." Her head drooped sideways, turning away
toward the wall.

Justine, that night, kept her vigil with an aching heart. The news of
Amherst's return had produced no sign of happiness in his wife--- the
tears had been forced from her merely by the dread of being kept alive
during the long days of pain before he came. The medical explanation
might have been that repeated crises of intense physical anguish, and
the deep lassitude succeeding them, had so overlaid all other feelings,
or at least so benumbed their expression, that it was impossible to
conjecture how Bessy's little half-smothered spark of soul had really
been affected by the news. But Justine did not believe in this argument.
Her experience among the sick had convinced her, on the contrary, that
the shafts of grief or joy will find a crack in the heaviest armour of
physical pain, that the tiniest gleam of hope will light up depths of
mental inanition, and somehow send a ray to the surface.... It was true
that Bessy had never known how to bear pain, and that her own sensations
had always formed the centre of her universe--yet, for that very reason,
if the thought of seeing Amherst had made her happier it would have
lifted, at least momentarily, the weight of death from her body.

Justine, at first, had almost feared the contrary effect--feared that
the moral dep