her imagination, terrible, menacing--a hideous, grim
spectre, before which Lloyd quailed with failing heart and breath. The
light, the almost divine radiance that had burst upon her, nevertheless
threw a dreadful shadow before it. Beneath the music she heard the growl
of the thunder. Her new-found happiness was not without its accompanying
dismay. Love had not returned to her heart alone. With it had returned
the old Enemy she had once believed had left her forever. Now it had
come back. As before, it lurked and leered at her from dark corners. It
crept to her side, to her back, ready to leap, ready to strike, to
clutch at her throat with cold fingers and bear her to the earth,
rending her heart with a grief she told herself she could not endure and
live. She loved him now with all her mind and might; how could it ever
have been otherwise? He belonged to her--and she? Why, she only lived
with his life; she seemed so bound to him as to be part of his very
self. Literally, she could not understand how it would be possible for
her to live if he should die. It seemed to her that with his death some
mysterious element of her life, something vital and fundamental, for
which there was no name, would disintegrate upon the instant and leave
her without the strength necessary for further existence. But this
would, however, be a relief. The prospect of the years after his death,
the fearful loneliness of life without him, was a horror before which
she veritably believed her reason itself must collapse.

"Lloyd."

Bennett was awake again and watching her with feverish anxiety from
where he lay among the pillows. "Lloyd," he repeated, the voice once so
deep and powerful quavering pitifully. "I was wrong. I don't want you to
go. Don't leave me."

In an instant Lloyd was at his side, kneeling by the bed. She caught one
of the great, gnarled hands, seamed and corded and burning with the
fever. "Never, never, dearest; never so long as I shall live."

IX.

When Adler heard Bennett's uncertain steps upon the stairs and the sound
of Lloyd's voice speaking to him and urging that there was no hurry, and
that he was to take but one step at a time, he wheeled swiftly about
from the windows of the glass-room, where he had been watching the
October breeze stirring the crimson and yellow leaves in the orchard,
and drew back his master's chair from the breakfast table and stood
behind it expectantly, his eyes watching the door.

Ll