7/11 She kept her word--perhaps she had never been away--but the next thing that happened was a noise of footsteps on the stairs, and then Paul woke--woke mind and body--and sat upright in his bed. There was no grey mist before them, as there had been sometimes in the night. No other stranger would have shed those tears at sight of him, and called him her dear boy, her pretty boy, her own poor blighted child. No other woman would have stooped down by his bed, and taken up his wasted hand, and put it to her lips and breast, as one who had some right to fondle it. |