No, he was not a stranger! She knew his thoughts and feelings as well as she knew her own; they were, in fact, the self-same thoughts and feelings as hers, which her husband distinctly lacked; perhaps luckily for himself; considering that he had to provide for family expenses.
'He's nearer my real self, he's more intimate with the real me than Will is, after all, even though I've never seen him,' she said.
She laid his book and picture on the table at the bedside, and when she was reclining on the pillow she re-read those of Robert Trewe's verses which she had marked from time to time as most touching and true.

Putting these aside, she set up the photograph on its edge upon the coverlet, and contemplated it as she lay.

Then she scanned again by the light of the candle the half-obliterated pencillings on the wall-paper beside her head.

There they were--phrases, couplets, bouts-rimes, beginnings and middles of lines, ideas in the rough, like Shelley's scraps, and the least of them so intense, so sweet, so palpitating, that it seemed as if his very breath, warm and loving, fanned her cheeks from those walls, walls that had surrounded his head times and times as they surrounded her own now.

He must often have put up his hand so--with the pencil in it.
Yes, the writing was sideways, as it would be if executed by one who extended his arm thus.
These inscribed shapes of the poet's world, 'Forms more real than living man, Nurslings of immortality,' were, no doubt, the thoughts and spirit-strivings which had come to him in the dead of night, when he could let himself go and have no fear of the frost of criticism.