At other times, when the fever was on, no arm availed to hold her as she tossed from side to side, talking of things at which a stranger would have marveled, and which made Richard's heart ache to its very core.

At times she was a girl in Chicopee, and all the past as connected with Frank Van Buren was lived over again; then she would talk of Richard, and shudder as she recalled the dreary, dreadful day when the honeysuckles were in blossom, and he came to make her his wife.
"It was wrong, all wrong.

I did not love him then," she said, "nor afterward, on the prairie, nor anywhere, until I went away, and found what it was to live without him." "And do you love him now ?" Richard asked her once when he sat alone with her.
There was no hesitancy on her part, no waiting to make up an answer.

It was ready on her lips, "Yes, oh, yes!" and the weak arms lifted themselves up and were wound around his neck with a pressure almost stifling.

How much of this was real Richard could not tell, but he accepted it as such, and waited impatiently for the day when the full light of reason should return and Ethie be restored to him.