ither loved nor knew, in her veins, and coursing through her very
heart! She must never know it.

"I am very grateful," he said to himself; then smiled and wondered to
whom he was grateful.

"How the old stamps and colors come out in the brain when one least
expects it!" he said. "What I meant was, _How glad I am!_"

Honest as he was, he did not feel called upon to examine whether _glad_
was really the word to represent the feeling which the thought of what
he had escaped, and of the creature he had saved from death, had sent up
into his consciousness. Glad he was indeed! but was there not mingled
with his gladness a touch of something else, very slight, yet potent
enough to make him mean _grateful_ when the word broke from him? and if
there was such a something, where did it come from? Perhaps if he had
caught and held the feeling, and submitted it to such a searching
scrutiny as he was capable of giving it, he might have doubted whether
any mother-instilled superstition ever struck root so deep as the depth
from which that seemed at least to come. I merely suggest it. The
feeling was a faint and poor one, and I do not care to reason from it. I
would not willingly waste upon small arguments, when I see more and more
clearly that our paltriest faults and dishonesties need one and the same
enormous cure.

But indeed never had Faber less time to examine himself than now, had
he been so inclined. With that big wound in it, he would as soon have
left a shell in the lady's chamber with the fuse lighted, as her arm to
itself. He did not leave the village all day. He went to see another
patient in it, and one on its outskirts, but he had his dinner at the
little inn where he put up Ruber, and all night long he sat by the
bedside of his patient. There the lovely white face, blind like a statue
that never had eyes, and the perfect arm, which now and then, with a
restless, uneasy, feeble toss, she would fling over the counterpane, the
arm he had to watch as the very gate of death, grew into his heart. He
dreaded the moment when she would open her eyes, and his might no longer
wander at will over her countenance. Again and again in the night he put
a hand under her head, and held a cooling draught to her lips; but not
even when she drank did her eyes open: like a child too weak to trust
itself, therefore free of all anxiety and fear, she took whatever came,
questioning nothing. He sat at the foot of the bed, where, with the
sl