Christian fiction; Medical fiction; Scotland -- Fiction; Surgeons -- Fiction; Wingfold, Thomas (Fictitious character) -- Fiction
Her father not unfrequently accompanied her to the Old House, but Juliet
and she had arranged such signals, and settled such understandings, that
the simple man saw nothing, heard nothing, forefelt nothing. Now and
then a little pang would quaver through Dorothy's bosom, when she caught
sight of him peering down into the terrible dusk of the pool, or heard
him utter some sympathetic hope for the future of poor Faber; but she
comforted herself with the thought of how glad he would be when she was
able to tell him all, and how he would laugh over the story of their
precautions against himself.
Her chief anxiety was for Juliet's health, even more for the sake of
avoiding discovery, than for its own. When the nights were warm she
would sometimes take her out in the park, and every day, one time or
another, would make her walk in the garden while she kept watch on the
top of the steep slope. Her father would sometimes remark to a friend
how Dorothy's love of solitude seemed to grow upon her; but the remark
suggested nothing, and slowly Juliet was being forgotten at Glaston.
It seemed to Dorothy strange that she did not fall ill. For the first
few days she was restless and miserable as human being could be. She had
but one change of mood: either she would talk feverously, or sit in the
gloomiest silence, now and then varied with a fit of abandoned weeping.
Every time Dorothy came from Glaston, she would overwhelm her with
questions--which at first Dorothy could easily meet, for she spoke
absolute fact when she said she knew nothing concerning her husband.
When at length the cause of his absence was understood, she told her he
was with his friend, Dr. May, at Broughill. Knowing the universal belief
that she had committed suicide, nothing could seem more natural. But
when, day after day, she heard the same thing for weeks, she began to
fear he would never be able to resume his practice, at least at Glaston,
and wept bitterly at the thought of the evil she had brought upon him
who had given her life, and love to boot. For her heart was a genuine
one, and dwelt far more on the wrong her too eager love had done him,
than on the hardness with which he had resented it. Nay, she admired him
for the fierceness of his resentment, witnessing, in her eyes, to the
purity of the man whom his neighbors regarded as wicked.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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