“I was looking for the paper to read to you.”
A sudden suspicion flamed in his eyes.
“Sidney.”
“Yes, dear.”
“You don’t like me to touch you any more. Come here where I can see you.”
The fear of agitating him brought her quickly. For a moment he was appeased.
“That’s more like it. How lovely you are, Sidney!” He lifted first one hand and then the other to his lips. “Are you ever going to forgive me?”
“If you mean about Carlotta, I forgave that long ago.”
He was almost boyishly relieved. What a wonder she was! So lovely, and so sane. Many a woman would have held that over him for years—not that he had done anything really wrong on that nightmare excursion. But so many women are exigent about promises.
“When are you going to marry me?”
“We needn’t discuss that tonight, Max.”
“I want you so very much. I don’t want to wait, dear. Let me tell Ed that you will marry me soon. Then, when I go away, I’ll take you with me.”
“Can’t we talk things over when you are stronger?”
Her tone caught his attention, and turned him a little white. He faced her to the window, so that the light fell full on her.
“What things? What do you mean?”
He had forced her hand. She had meant to wait; but, with his keen eyes on her, she could not dissemble.
“I am going to make you very unhappy for a little while.”
“Well?”
“I’ve had a lot of time to think. If you had really wanted me, Max—”
“My God, of course I want you!”
“It isn’t that I am angry. I am not even jealous. I was at first. It isn’t that. It’s hard to make you understand. I think you care for me—”
“I love you! I swear I never loved any other woman as I love you.”
Suddenly he remembered that he had also sworn to put Carlotta out of his life. He knew that Sidney remembered, too; but she gave no sign.
“Perhaps that’s true. You might go on caring for me. Sometimes I think you would. But there would always be other women, Max. You’re like that. Perhaps you can’t help it.”
“If you loved me you could do anything with me.” He was half sullen.
By the way her color leaped, he knew he had struck fire. All his conjectures as to how Sidney would take the knowledge of his entanglement with Carlotta had been founded on one major premise—that she loved him. The mere suspicion made him gasp.
“But, good Heavens, Sidney, you do care for me, don’t you?”
“I’m afraid I don’t, Max; not enough.”
She tried to explain, rather pitifully. After one look at his face, she spoke to the window.
“I’m so wretched about it. I thought I cared. To me you were the best and greatest man that ever lived. I— when I said my prayers, I—But that doesn’t matter. You were a sort of god to me. When the Lamb—that’s one of the internes, you know—nicknamed you the ‘Little Tin God,’ I was angry. You could never be anything little to me, or do anything that wasn’t big. Do you see?”
He groaned under his breath.
“No man could live up to that, Sidney.”
“No. I see that now. But that’s the way I cared. Now I know that I didn’t care for you, really, at all. I built up an idol and worshiped it. I always saw you through a sort of haze. You were operating, with everybody standing by, saying how wonderful it was. Or you were coming to the wards, and everything was excitement, getting ready for you. I blame myself terribly. But you see, don’t you? It isn’t that I think you are wicked. It’s just that I never loved the real you, because I never knew you.”
When he remained silent, she made an attempt to justify herself.
“I’d known very few men,” she said. “I came into the hospital, and for a time life seemed very terrible. There were wickednesses I had never heard of, and somebody always paying for them. I was always asking, Why? Why? Then you would come in, and a lot of them you cured and sent out. You gave them their chance, don’t you see? Until I knew about Carlotta, you always meant that to me. You were like K.—always helping.”
The room was very silent. In the nurses’ parlor, a few feet down the corridor, the nurses were at prayers.
“The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want,” read the Head, her voice calm with the quiet of twilight and the end of the day.
“He maketh me to lie down in green pastures: he leadeth me beside the still waters.”
The nurses read the response a little slowly, as if they, too, were weary.
