In those few seconds of
silence all sorts of apprehensions and fears had crowded in upon me.
Her health! What barrier need that make between us? And in that
moment of selfish passion that was all I heeded.
"What has that to do with our marriage?" I asked, laughing, and
bending down farther over her. "You don't mean that you are too ill
to go through the ceremony. Come!"
She met my gaze fully, and then laughed too. After a second she
said,--
"If you disbelieve me and think I am making up, you can at any rate
tell from my looks that I am ill--any man can see that."
I looked at her critically now, remembering my feeling of shock when
I had first seen her on my return. Yes; I remembered I had thought
her looking fearfully overworked and exhausted, and now I looked at
her again with redoubled anxiety.
From the black lace of her dinner dress, cut as low as vanity dared
to dictate, and with but one narrow black strip supporting it on her
shoulders, her white throat and breast and light head rose like dawn
out of the night ocean. The milky arms that lay idly along the chair
were as smooth, as downy, but far less dimpled than when I had seen
them in Paris. Round the throat I could trace now the clavicles,
formerly invisible, and lower, at the edge of her bodice, the
depression in the centre of the soft breast was wider.
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