He woke dazed; but he had sense enough to roll her in the rug and crush the flames out.

CHAPTER XVI

THE NEW LIFE

“There is now every hope,” so wrote that cheerful lady, Mrs. Wilcox, “of dear Molly’s complete recovery.”

This, translated from the language of optimism, meant that dear Molly’s beauty was dead, but that Molly would live.

To live, indeed, was not what she had wanted.  Mrs. Nevill Tyson had made up her mind to die; and in the certain hope of death she had borne the dressing of her burns without a murmur.  Lying there, swathed in her bandages, life came back slowly and unwillingly to her aching nerves and thirsting veins; and the sense of life woke with a sting, as if her brain were bound tight, tight, and the pulse of thought beat thickly under the intolerable ligatures.  Then, when they told her she would live, she screamed and made as though she would tear the bandages from her head and throat.

“Take them off,” she cried, “I won’t have them.  You said I was going to die, and I want to die—­I want to die—­I tell you.  Don’t let Nevill come near me.  He’ll want to come and look at me when I’m dead.  Don’t let him come!”

But Nevill was there.  The first thing he did, when he heard the doctor’s verdict, was to go straight into his wife’s room and cry.  He bent over her bed, sobbing hysterically—­“Molly—­Molly—­my little wife!”

That made her suddenly quiet.

She turned towards him, and her eyes looked bigger and darker than ever in the section of her face that was not covered with bandages.  She held out her hand, the right hand that had clung with such a grip to his coat-sleeve and was thus left unhurt.  He stroked it and kissed it many times over, he said what a pretty hand it was; and then, when he remembered the things he had said and thought of her, he cried again.

“This excitement is very bad for her.  Shall I tell him to go away?” whispered Mrs. Wilcox to the nurse.  The nurse shook her head.

Mrs. Nevill Tyson had heard; she gave a queer little fluttering laugh that was meant to be derisive and ended like a sob.  “If you went away, both of you,” said she, “I might feel better.”

They went away and left them.

From that moment Mrs. Nevill Tyson was no longer bent upon dying.  She had conceived an immense hope—­that old, old hope of the New Life.  They would begin all over again and from the very beginning.  Life is an endless beginning.  Had not Nevill’s tears assured her that he loved her still, in spite of what had been done to her?  It takes so much to make a man cry.

Mrs. Nevill Tyson may have understood men; it is not so clear that she knew all about sentimentalists.  It seemed as though her beauty being dead, all that was blind and selfish in her passion for Nevill had died with it.  She was glad to be delivered from the torment of the senses, to feel that the immortal human soul of her love was free.  And as she was very young and had the heart of a little child, she firmly believed that her husband’s emotions had undergone the same purifying regenerating process.