er
dreaming it away, after profaning it with matters strange to it, has
waked up again to serenity of certitude and has only to lie and watch it
grow. This was the drift of his patience--that he had only to let it
shine on him. He must moreover, with intermissions, still have been
lifted and borne; since why and how else should he have known himself,
later on, with the afternoon glow intenser, no longer at the foot of his
stairs--situated as these now seemed at that dark other end of his
tunnel--but on a deep window-bench of his high saloon, over which had
been spread, couch-fashion, a mantle of soft stuff lined with grey fur
that was familiar to his eyes and that one of his hands kept fondly
feeling as for its pledge of truth. Mrs. Muldoon's face had gone, but
the other, the second he had recognised, hung over him in a way that
showed how he was still propped and pillowed. He took it all in, and the
more he took it the more it seemed to suffice: he was as much at peace as
if he had had food and drink. It was the two women who had found him, on
Mrs. Muldoon's having plied, at her usual hour, her latch-key--and on her
having above all arrived while Miss Staverton still lingered near the
house. She had been turning away, all anxiety, from worrying the vain
bell-handle--her calculation having been of the hour of the good woman's
visit; but the latter, blessedly, had come up while she was still there,
and they had entered together. He had then lain, beyond the vestibule,
very much as he was lying now--quite, that is, as he appeared to have
fallen, but all so wondrously without bruise or gash; only in a depth of
stupor. What he most took in, however, at present, with the steadier
clearance, was that Alice Staverton had for a long unspeakable moment not
doubted he was dead.

"It must have been that I _was_." He made it out as she held him. "Yes--I
can only have died. You brought me literally to life. Only," he
wondered, his eyes rising to her, "only, in the name of all the
benedictions, how?"

It took her but an instant to bend her face and kiss him, and something
in the manner of it, and in the way her hands clasped and locked his head
while he felt the cool charity and virtue of her lips, something in all
this beatitude somehow answered everything.

"And now I keep you," she said.

"Oh keep me, keep me!" he pleaded while her face still hung over him: in
response to which it dropped again and stayed close, cl