At any rate, he found reading difficult, and the paper
slid away.
The pain, however, would not let him doze. He looked helplessly round
the room, feeling depressed and wretched. Why were his mother and Alicia
out so long? They neglected and forgot him. Yet he could not but
remember that they had both devoted themselves to him in the morning,
had read to him and written for him, and he had not been a very grateful
patient. He recalled, with bitterness, the look of smiling relief with
which Alicia had sprung up at the sound of the luncheon-bell, dropping
the book from which she had been reading aloud, and the little song he
had heard her humming in the corridor as she passed his door on her way
down-stairs.
_She_ was in no pain physical or mental, and she had probably no
conception of what he had endured these six days and nights. But one
would have thought that mere instinctive sympathy with the man to whom
she was secretly engaged.
For they were secretly engaged. It was during one of their early drives,
in the canvassing of the first election, that he had lost his head one
June afternoon, as they found themselves alone, crossing a beech wood on
one of the private roads of the Tallyn estate; the groom having been
despatched on a message to a farm-house.
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