implacable reserve.

He took up the book again, and she fell asleep at the sound of the
reading. He sat and watched her.

Straight and still in her white draperies, she lay like a dead woman.
Some trick of the shaded lamplight, falling on her face, exaggerated
its pallor and discoloration. He was fascinated by the very horror of it;
as he stared at her face it seemed to expand, to grow vague and
insubstantial, till his strained gaze relaxed and shifted, making it
start into relief again. He watched it swimming in and out of a liquid
dusk of vision, till the sight of it became almost a malady of the
nerves. And as she saw it now he would see it all the days of his life.
He felt like the living captive bound to the dead in some infernal
triumph of Fate. Dead and not dead--that was the horrible thing. Beneath
that mask that was not Molly, Molly was alive. She would live, she would
be young when he was long past middle age.

He found it in him to think bitterly of the little thing for the courage
that had saved his life--for that. Of all her rash and inconsiderate
actions this was the worst. Courage had never formed part of his feminine
ideal; it was the glory of the brute and the man, and she should have
left it to men and to brutes like him. And yet if that detestable
"accident," as she called it, had happened to him, she would have loved
him all the better for it.

Odd. But some women are made so. Marion Hathaway was that sort--she stuck
like a leech.

And now--the frivolous, feather-headed little wife, whom he had held so
cheap and wronged so lightly, urging her folly as almost a justification
of the wrong, she too--She appalled him with the terrific eternity of her
love. Was it possible that this feeling, which he had despised as the
blind craving and clinging of the feminine animal, could take a place
among the supreme realities, the things more living than flesh and blood,
which in his way he still contrived to believe in? The idea made him
extremely uncomfortable, and he put it from him. He had drifted into that
stagnant backwater of the soul where the scum of thought rises to the
surface. Molly was better than most women; but, poor little thing, there
was nothing transcendent about her virtues. She loved him after the
manner of her kind.

No--no--no. She loved him as no other woman had ever loved him before.
She loved him because she believed in him against the evidence of her
senses. If she only knew! A di