, Mr. Curtis."

CHAPTER XXXVI

When Maurice saw his wife the next morning, it was with Mrs. Houghton's
warning--emphasized by the presence of a nurse--that he must not excite
her. So he sat at her bedside and told her about his trip, and how he
had got ahead of the Greenleaf heirs, and how he rushed back to Mercer
the minute those dispatches came saying that she was ill--and he never
asked her why she was ill, or what took her out to the river in the cold
dusk of that March afternoon. She didn't try to tell him. She was very
warm and drowsy--and she held in her hand, under the bedclothes, that
letter which proved how much she loved him, and which, some time, when
she got well, she would show him. All that day the household outside her
closed door was very much upset; but Eleanor, in the big bed, was
perfectly placid. She lay mere watching the tarnished gilt pendulum
swing between the black pillars of the clock on the mantelpiece,
thinking--thinking. "You'll be all right to-morrow!" Maurice would say;
and she would smile silently and go on thinking. "When I get well," she
thought, "I will do--so and so." By and by, still with the letter
clutched in her hot hand, she began to say to herself, "_If_ I get
well." She had ceased worrying over how she was going to explain the
"accident" to Maurice; that _"if"_ left a door open into eternal
reticence. So, instead of worrying, she made plans for Jacky: "He must
see a dentist," she told Maurice. On the third day she stopped saying,
"_If_ I get well," and thought, "When I die." She said it very
tranquilly, "When I die Maurice must get him a bicycle." She thought of
this happily, for dying meant that she had not failed. She would not be
ridiculous to Maurice--she would be his wife, giving him a child--a
son! So she lay with her eyes closed, thinking of the bicycle and many
little, pleasant things; and with the old, slipping inexactness of mind
she told herself that she had not "done anything wrong"; she had _not_
drowned herself! She had just caught a bad cold. But she would die, and
Maurice would love her for giving him Jacky. Toward evening, however, an
uneasy thought came to her: if Maurice knew that, to give him Jacky, she
had even tried to get drowned, it might distress him? She wished she
hadn't written the letter! It would hurt him to see it.... Well, but he
_needn't_ see it! She held out the crumpled envelope. "Miss Ryan," she
said to the nurse, huskily, "please bu