“It is well that my face does not show loss of flesh as quickly as the rest of my body does,” she said quietly.  “I have lost thirty-five pounds of flesh in four months, and nobody observed it!  Yes, dear,” she went on, “I have felt it.  More than that, I have felt it increasingly every hour, and I can bear no more.  Up to this time I have never by look or tone shown to John that I knew it.  He wonders every hour what it means that I do not.  I have never by so much as the slightest act watched him.  I have seen notes in Emma’s handwriting lying on his desk, and I have left the house lest I might be tempted to read them!  I know that he has as yet done no clandestine thing, but at any moment I should have led them both into it by showing one symptom of jealousy.  And I should have roused in his heart a feeling of irritation and impatience with me, which would have done in one hour more to intensify his love for her, and to change its nature from a pure, involuntary sentiment into an acknowledged and guilty one, than years and years of free intercourse could do.  But I have reached the limit of my physical endurance.  My nerves are giving away.  I am really very ill, but nothing is out of order in my body aside from the effects of this anguish.  A month more of this would make me a hopelessly broken-down woman.  A month’s absence from the sight of it will almost make me well.”

I could not refrain from interrupting her.

“Ellen, you are mad! you are mad!  You mean to go away and leave him to see her constantly alone, unrestrained by your presence?  It has almost killed you to see it.  How can you bear imagining it, knowing it?”

“Better than I can bear seeing it, far better.  Because I have still undiminished confidence in the real lastingness of the bond between John and me.  Emma Long would have been no doubt a good, a very good wife for him.  But I am the mother of his children, and just so surely as right is right, and wrong is wrong, he will return to me and to them.  All wrong things are like diseases, self-limited.  It is wrong for a man to love any woman better than he loves his wife; I don’t deny that, dear,” she said, half smiling through her tears at my indignant face; “but a man may seem to do it when he is really very far from it.  He may really do it for days, for months—­for years, perhaps; but if he be a true man, and his wife a true wife, he will return.  John is a true husband and a still truer father:  that I am the mother of his five children, he can never forget.  If I had had no children, it would be different.  If I had ever been for one moment an unloving wife, it would be different; but I am his; I believe that he is mine; and that I shall live to remind you of all these things, Sally, after time has proved them true.”

I was almost dumb with surprise.  I was astounded.  To me it seemed that her plan was simply suicidal.  I told her in the strongest words I could use of the scene of the night before.