Till the day
of his injury and his defeat, Marsham had been in truth the wooed and
Alicia the wooer. Now it seemed to him as though, through his physical
pain, he were all the time clinging to something that shrank away and
resisted him--something that would ultimately elude and escape him.
He knew well that Alicia liked sickness and melancholy no more than he
did; and he was constantly torn between a desire to keep her near him
and a perception that to tie her to his sick-room was, in fact, the
worst of policies.
Persistently, in the silence of the hot room, there rang through his
brain the questions: "Do I really care whether she stays or goes?--do I
love her?--shall I ever marry her?" Questions that were immediately
answered, it seemed, by the rise of a wave of desolate and desperate
feeling. He was maimed and ruined; life had broken under his feet. What
if also he were done forever with love and marriage?
There were still some traces in his veins of the sedative drug which had
given him a few hours' sleep during the night. Under its influence a
feverish dreaminess overtook him, alive with fancies and images. Ferrier
and Diana were among the phantoms that peopled the room.
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