Yet he hesitated; another strange
suggestion--it seemed almost a vague recollection--overcame him like
some lingering perfume, far off and pathetic, in its dying familiarity.
He turned his eyes almost timidly towards the bed. The coverlet was
drawn up near the throat of the figure to replace the striped cotton
gown stained with blood and dust, which had been hurriedly torn off
and thrown on a chair. The pale face, cleansed of blood and disguising
color, the long hair, still damp from the surgeon's sponge, lay rigidly
back on the pillow. Suddenly this man of steady nerve uttered a faint
cry, and, with a face as white as the upturned one before him, fell on
his knees beside the bed. For the face that lay there was his wife's!
Yes, hers! But the beautiful hair that she had gloried in--the hair that
in his youth he had thought had once fallen like a benediction on his
shoulder--was streaked with gray along the blue-veined hollows of the
temples; the orbits of those clear eyes, beneath their delicately arched
brows, were ringed with days of suffering; only the clear-cut profile,
even to the delicate imperiousness of lips and nostril, was still there
in all its beauty. The coverlet had slipped from her shoulder; its
familiar cold contour startled him.
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