"Wait. He is as guiltless as you are." Dr. Forman paused a minute or two, and then took up the thread of his discourse where he had left off describing his sending Priscilla Thorburn home. "I brought her, with my man's help, into the house, and had her put in bed. It was plainly nothing but a faint; but she went from one fainting spell into another, and when I had finally brought her round, the fainting spell changed into convulsions. For hours I worked with her. At last I stopped them, and got her under the influence of an opiate. I was tired myself, and went to bed to get a few hours' sleep, leaving word for Curtis to be called. In the middle of the night I was waked by Jane standing by my bedside, looking frightened out of her wits. 'Do, pray, Dr. Forman, come to the strange lady.' When I got to the room she was lying in the bed, weak, but perfectly conscious. She intimated to me that she wished to say something to me privately. Of course I tried to induce her to put it off, but she was determined. "I saw that she was no ordinary woman--she had been beautiful--and she was still comely. And she had that air of melancholy command that those who are in the crisis of tremendous misfortunes only have. So I sent Jane out of the room. Then she said, in the calmest possible way, 'Doctor, I am the first wife of Edmund Thorburn.' I was incredulous, and thought her crazy, the more so that the next thing she told was that she had been for the last six years in a lunatic asylum. But when she told me her story I saw that she was at that moment as sane as I was. And such a story!" Dr. Forman, a stolid man usually, took out his handkerchief and buried his face in it, and an occasional sob escaped from him. Dr. Sunbury put his hand to his eyes, as the doctor gasped out at intervals. "They were so happy! She had given up everything to marry him, and wanted him to give up his parish because it did not suit him, and to take some such charge as East Harrowby, and to share his poverty with him--she, delicately nurtured and finely bred. And then came the terrible illness, and a still more terrible blank; and then, after years which are as nothing in her mind, a return, an awakening, a resurrection to life and the most perfect felicity, so she thought--poor thing, poor thing!--and when she got here, to East Harrowby, she was so overcome with the happiness in store for them, that she felt her heart would burst if she saw him too suddenly--she wandered about, waiting until dusk to go to his house, and to throw herself in her husband's arms--" Dr. Forman paused for a long time. Then presently recovering himself, he suddenly fell into his calm, professional tone.