"I have been smiling all day," she sometimes said to him. "People have asked me why I looked so gay, and what I had heard that was funny. It is just because I am entirely happy, and because the feeling is still a surprise. Shall I ever get over it? Am I silly? No!"
Her gladness of heart seemed to make her angelic. She rejoiced in every joy around her, and grieved for every sorrow. She visited the poor of her husband's patients, watched with them when there was need, made little collections for their relief, chatted away their forebodings, half cured them with her smile. There was something catching, comforting, uplifting in the spectacle of that overbrimming content.
The well were as susceptible to its influence as the sick. Once, half a dozen men and twice as many boys were seen engaged in recovering her veil out of a pond into which the wind had blown it; and when it was handed to her by a shy youth on the end of a twenty-foot pole, all felt repaid for their labors by the childlike burst of laughter with which she received it. Now and then, however, shadows fell across this sunshine. In those dark moments she frequently reverted to the unhappy couple of whom she had told Leighton when he first spoke to her of marriage. She was possessed to describe the man--his dull, filmy, unsympathetic black eyes, his methodical life and hard rationality, his want of sentiment and tenderness.
"Why do you talk of that person so much?" Leighton implored. "You seem to be charging me with his cruelty. I am not like him."
The tears filled her eyes as she started toward him, saying, "No, you are _not_ like him. Even if you should become like him, I couldn't reproach you. I should merely die."
"But you know him so well?" he added, inquiringly. "You seem to fear him. Has he any power over you?"
For a moment she was so sombre that he half feared lest her mind was unstrung on this one subject.
"No," she at last said. "His power is gone--nearly gone. Oh, if I could only forget!"
After another pause, during which she seemed to be nerving herself to a confession, she threw herself into her husband's arms and whispered, "He is my--uncle."
He was puzzled by the contrast between the violence of her emotion and the unimportance of this avowal; but as he at least saw that the subject was painful to her, and as he was all confidence and gentleness, he put no more inquiries.