Page:The Fruit of the Tree (Wharton 1907).djvu/439

Rh self-betrayal over which she had hung, and the nearness of the peril nerved her to a last effort of dissimulation.

“I can’t … talk of it … any longer,” she faltered, letting her tears ﬂow, and turning on him a face of pure womanly weakness.

Wyant looked at her without answering. Did he distrust even these plain physical evidences of exhaustion, or was he merely disappointed in her, as in one whom he had believed to be above the emotional failings of her sex?

“You’re over-tired,” he said coldly. “Take tonight to rest. Miss Mace can replace you for the next few hours—and I may need you more tomorrow.”

XXIX

OUR more days had passed. Bessy seldom spoke when Justine was with her. She was wrapped in a thickening cloud of opiates—morphia by day, bromides, sulphonal, chloral hydrate at night. When the cloud broke and consciousness emerged, it was centred in the one acute point of bodily anguish. Darting throes of neuralgia, agonized oppression of the breath, the diffused misery of the whole helpless body—these were reducing their victim to a mere instrument on which pain played its incessant deadly variations. Once [ 423 ]