"At times, knowing that if we stopped another moment in these rooms we
should scream, we would steal softly out and rush downstairs, and,
shutting ourselves out of hearing in a cellar underneath the yard, laugh
till we reeled against the dirty walls. I think we were both getting a
little mad.
"One day--it was the third of that nightmare life, so I learned
afterwards, though for all I could have told then it might have been the
three hundredth, for Time seemed to have fled from that house as from a
dream, so that all things were tangled--I made a slip that came near to
ending the matter, then and there.
"I had gone into that other room. Jeanie had left her post for a moment,
and the place was empty.
"I did not think what I was doing. I had not closed my eyes that I can
remember since the wife had died, and my brain and my senses were losing
their hold of one another. I went through my usual performance of
talking loudly to the thing underneath the white sheet, and noisily
patting the pillows and rattling the bottles on the table.
"On my return, he asked me how she was, and I answered, half in a dream,
'Oh, bonny, she's trying to read a little,' and he raised himself on his
elbow and called out to her, and for answer there came back silence--not
the silence that _is_ silence, but the silence that is as a voice.
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