" And he stayed. For three years he stayed in the shadow of Meerlust; a model of the uttermost devotion; a lost soul in purgatory. It would have been better, as the doctor had said, if Catherine Stone had died. Within twenty-four hours of the original disaster
she recovered consciousness, lying, as the half-dead lie, with one side paralysed and without the power of speech. She could not speak, but she could see. Her eyes never stopped seeing. Through the long hours of
day and night when Morton sat by her, watching in silence, those blue eyes dwelt on him. There was no bitterness, no accusation in them — only a supernatural power of penetration, terribly impersonal, which
seemed to pierce through into the depths of his consciousness, stripping bare the pretences of tenderness, the realities of remorse with which he comforted him-
self.He might easily deceive himself, but never Catherine’s eyes. "

― Francis Brett Young , The Cage Bird and Other Stories