tor to
a sick bed, Brant entered the room. But some instinct greater than this
common expression of humanity held him suddenly in awe. The room seemed
no longer his--it had slipped back into that austere conventual privacy
which had first impressed him. Yet he hesitated; another strange
suggestion--it seemed almost a vague recollection--overcame him like
some lingering perfume, far off and pathetic, in its dying familiarity.
He turned his eyes almost timidly towards the bed. The coverlet was
drawn up near the throat of the figure to replace the striped cotton
gown stained with blood and dust, which had been hurriedly torn off
and thrown on a chair. The pale face, cleansed of blood and disguising
color, the long hair, still damp from the surgeon's sponge, lay rigidly
back on the pillow. Suddenly this man of steady nerve uttered a faint
cry, and, with a face as white as the upturned one before him, fell on
his knees beside the bed. For the face that lay there was his wife's!

Yes, hers! But the beautiful hair that she had gloried in--the hair that
in his youth he had thought had once fallen like a benediction on his
shoulder--was streaked with gray along the blue-veined hollows of the
temples; the orbits of those clear eyes, beneath their delicately arched
brows, were ringed with days of suffering; only the clear-cut profile,
even to the delicate imperiousness of lips and nostril, was still there
in all its beauty. The coverlet had slipped from her shoulder; its
familiar cold contour startled him. He remembered how, in their early
married days, he had felt the sanctity of that Diana-like revelation,
and the still nymph-like austerity which clung to this strange,
childless woman. He even fancied that he breathed again the subtle
characteristic perfume of the laces, embroideries, and delicate
enwrappings in her chamber at Robles. Perhaps it was the intensity of
his gaze--perhaps it was the magnetism of his presence--but her lips
parted with a half sigh, half moan. Her head, although her eyes were
still closed, turned on the pillow instinctively towards him. He rose
from his knees. Her eyes opened slowly. As the first glare of wonderment
cleared from them, they met him--in the old antagonism of spirit. Yet
her first gesture was a pathetic feminine movement with both hands to
arrange her straggling hair. It brought her white fingers, cleaned
of their disguising stains, as a sudden revelation to her of what had
happened; she i