d to notice that he was
awake. She turned sharply and gazed at him with a look of inimical
contempt that aggrieved and scarified him very acutely. Making no
answer to his query, content solely to condemn it with her eyes as
egotistic and vain, she said--

"I'm going to make you some food."

And then she curtly showed him her bent back, and over the foot of the
bed he could see her preparations--preliminary stirring with a spoon,
the placing of the bright tin saucepan on the lamp, the opening of the
wick, seizing of the match-box.

As soon as the cooking was in train, she threw up the window wide and
then came to the bed.

"I'll just put your bed to rights again," she remarked, and seized the
pillow, waiting implacably for him to raise his head. He had to raise
his head.

"I'm very ill," he moaned.

She replied in a tone of calm indifference--

"I know you are. But you'll soon be better. You're getting a little
better every hour." And she finished arranging the bed, which was
presently in a state of smooth geometrical correctness. He could find
no fault with her efficiency, nor with her careful handling of his
sensitive body. But the hard, the marmoreal cruelty of his wife's
spirit exquisitely wounded his soul, which, after all, was at least as
much in need of consolation as his body. He was positively daunted.

II

He had passed through dreadful moments in the early part of the night
while Rachel slept. When he had realized that he was doomed--for the
conviction that death was upon him had been absolutely sincere and
final for a long time--he was panic-stricken, impressed, and strangely
proud, all at once. But the panic was paramount. He was afraid,
horribly afraid. His cowardice was ghastly, even to himself, shot
through though it was by a peculiar appreciation of the grandiosity
of his fate as a martyr to clumsy chance. He was reduced by it to
the trembling repentant sinner, as the proud prisoner is reduced to
abjection by prolonged and secret torture in Oriental prisons. He
ranged in fright over the whole of his career, and was obliged to
admit, and to admit with craven obsequiousness, that he had been a
wicked man, obstinate in wickedness.

He remembered matters which had utterly vanished from his memory. He
remembered, for example, the excellence of his moral aspirations when
he had first thought of Rachel as a wife, and the firm, high resolves
which were to be carried out if he married her. Forgo