Page:The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (emended first edition), Volume 3.djvu/206

196 —I must change them again if I stay. A professional nurse, a grim, hard old woman, had been hired to attend the wretched invalid. He suffers much, and has no fortitude to bear him through. The immediate injuries he sustained from the accident, however, were not very severe, and would, as the doctor says, have been but trifling to a man of temperate habits; but with him it is very different. On the night of my arrival, when I first entered his room, he was lying in a kind of half delirium. He did not notice me till I spoke; and then, he mistook me tor another.

"Is it you, Alice, come again?" he murmured. "What did you leave me for?"

"It is I, Arthur—it is Helen, your wife," I replied.

"My wife!" said he, with a start.—"For Heaven's sake, don't mention her!—I have none.—Devil take her," he cried, a moment after,—"and you too! What did you do it for?"