A Daughter of the Vine by Gertrude Atherton

Two weeks later she sat huddled over the fire in the library. Her face was yellow; her eyes were sunken and dull; her hands trembled. She looked thirty-five.

In her lap lay a letter from Dudley Thorpe. He and his brother, at the risk of their lives, had got through the lines and reached New York. The excitement, fatigue, and exposure had nearly killed Harold, who was in a hospital in a precarious condition. Thorpe could not leave him. He implored her to come on to New York at once; and he had never written a more tender and passionate letter.