Page:Lost Ecstasy (1927).pdf/216

 "Look at me. I'll go, if you say you have stopped caring and don't want me."

"It isn't a question of caring. You married a man, not a cripple, and I'm giving you your chance to get out from under. You'd better take it before I yell my fool head off."

The mixed emotions of the next few days almost exhausted her. He rose to heights of the tenderest love, only the next moment to thrust her from him and sink into depths of sullen despair. Once, determined to move the stiffened ankle, he got out of bed and tried to walk on it, and the nurse found him flat on the floor, in a faint. Again he insisted on proof that the company was paying his hospital bills, and not her family.

"Remember this," he told her darkly. "If you stick to me, you get no help from them. I'm no kept man, and I don't want their dirty money."

There was a terrible scene when they brought in his crutches. He sat in his wheeled chair—he was up by that time—and taking them in his hands turned them over with a mocking smile.

"Pretty, aren't they?" he said. "All shiny and nice and—Where's the tin cup, Kay? There ought to be a tin cup to go with them."

Suddenly he flung them across the room.

He was never reconciled to them. Now and then she coaxed him to walk with her in the hospital corridor. He would swing along, his big shoulders hunched, the bad foot hanging awkwardly, but if he saw any one but the nurses he would turn abruptly and start back. And what was worse for her, she felt that he was harboring a suspicion that, in maiming his fine body, he had somehow lost his claim on her. He was less arrogant in his demands on her love, more inclined to those long and bitter periods when he lay and stared at the ceiling with his hands clenched, darkly plotting some secret revenge of his own.

But along with this he was, she discovered, cherishing a hope too. When they showed him his X-ray plates he scoffed at them, and at the surgeons after they had gone.

"Just because a fellow wears a white coat doesn't mean