"
The last part of the speech was spoken in a dreary monotone. She stopped
with a heart-broken sigh that expressed hopeless loneliness in this mad
quest.
"The baby is dead," he said gently.
She answered him with eager, excited voice:
"No, she isn't; that's where you are wrong. You put it on the stone that
she was dead. When I came out of th' asylum I went to look at the stone,
and I laughed. But I liked you to make the stone; that's why I like you,
because nobody else put up a stone for her."
Caius laid a cool hand on the feverish one she was now brandishing at
him.
"You are dying, you say"--pityingly. "It is better for you to think that
your baby is dead, for when you die you will go to her."
The woman laughed, not harshly, but happily.
"She isn't dead. She came back to me once. She was grown a big girl, and
had a wedding-ring on her hand. Who do you think she was married to? I
thought perhaps it was you."
The repetition of this old question came from her lips so suddenly that
Caius dropped her hand and stepped back a pace. He felt his heart
beating. Was it a good omen? There have been cases where a half-crazed
brain has been known, by chance or otherwise, to foretell the future.
The question that was now for the second time repeated to him seemed to
his hope like an instance of this second sight, only half understood by
the eye that saw it.
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