Later he lay by her side, a host of indefinable fears keeping him company.
He could not sleep. He did not even remotely guess the nature of her
trouble, but he knew instinctively that the very foundations of her being
had been disturbed.

Once, toward morning, she began to cry piteously. "No, oh no!" The words
were repeated in anguish until Harboro, in despair, seized her in his
arms. "What is it, Sylvia?" he cried. "No one shall harm you!"

He held her on his breast and soothed her, his own face harrowed with
pain. And he noticed that she withdrew into herself again, and seemed
remote, a stranger to him.

Then she fell into a sound sleep and breathed evenly for hours. The dawn
broke and a wan light filled the room. Harboro saw that her face was the
face of Sylvia again--the face of a happy child, as it seemed to him. In
her sleep she reached out for him contentedly and found his throat, and
her fingers rested upon it with little, intermittent, loving pressures.

Finally she awoke. She awoke, but Harboro's crowning torture came when he
saw the expression in her eyes. The horror of one who tumbles into a
bottomless abyss was in them. But now--thank God!--she drew herself to him
passionately and wept in his arms. The day had brought back to her the
capacity to think, to compare the fine edifice she and Harboro had built
with the wreck which a cruel beast had wrought. She sobbed her strength
away on Harboro's breast.

And when the sun arose she looked into her husband's gravely steadfast
eyes, and knew that she must tell the truth. She knew that there was
nothing else for her to do. She spared her father, inventing little
falsehoods on his behalf; herself she spared, confessing no fault of her
own. But the truth, as to how on the night before Fectnor had trapped her
and wronged her in her father's house, she told. She knew that Harboro
would never have permitted her to rest if she had not told him; she knew
that she must have gone mad if she had not unbosomed herself to this man
who was as the only tree in the desert of her life.

CHAPTER XV

She was puzzled by the manner in which he heard her to the end. She
expected an outburst; and she found only that after one moment, during
which his body became rigid and a look of incredulous horror settled in
his eyes, a deadly quiet enveloped him. He did not try to comfort her--and
certainly there was no evidence that he blamed her. He asked her a few
questions w