ife. I watched on with staring eyes,
rubbing her wasted body now and again, and always keeping the heat of
the bath at a constant. From the first I had barred the door against
all who would have come near to help me. With my own hands I had laid
my love to sleep, and I could not bear that others should rouse her,
if indeed roused she should ever be. But after those first offers, no
others came, and the snarl and din of fighting told of what occupied
them.

It is hard to take note of small changes which occur with infinite
slowness when one is all the while on the tense watch, and high strung
though my senses were, I think there must have been some indication of
returning life shown before I was keen enough to notice it. For of a
sudden, as I gazed, I saw a faint rippling on the surface of the water
of the bath. Gods! Would it come back again to my love at last--this
life, this wakefulness? The ripple died out as it had come, and I
stooped my head nearer to the bath to try if I could see some faint
heaving of her bosom some small twitching of the limbs. No, she lay
there still without even a flutter of movement. But as I watched, surely
it seemed to my aching eyes that some tinge was beginning to warm that
blank whiteness of skin?

How I filled myself with that sight. The colour was returning to her
again beyond a doubt. Once more the dried blood was becoming fluid and
beginning again to course in its old channels. Her hair floated out in
the liquid of the bath like some brown tangle of the ocean weed, and
ever and again it twitched and eddied to some impulse which in itself
was too small for the eye to see.

She had slept for nine long years, and I knew that the wakening could
be none of the suddenest. Indeed, it came by its own gradations and
with infinite slowness, and I did not dare do more to hasten it. Further
drugs might very well stop eternally what those which had been used
already had begun. So I sat motionless where I was, and watched the
colour come back, and the waxenness go, and even the fullness of her
curves in some small measure return. And when growing strength gave
her power to endure them, and she was racked with those pains which are
inevitable to being born back again in this fashion to life, I too felt
the reflex of her agony, and writhed in loving sympathy.

Still further, too, was I wrung by a torment of doubt as to whether life
or these rackings would in the end be conqueror. After each paro