ating violently
with pain, a heart indistinguishable from his own. Other women (it was he
who had used the words)--was it simply by her share in their grim lot
that Mrs. Nevill Tyson had contrived to invest herself with this somber
significance? Perhaps. It was the same woman that he had driven with,
laughed with, flirted with a hundred times--the woman that in the natural
course of things (Tyson apart) he would infallibly have made love to; and
yet in one day and one night her prettinesses, her impertinences had
fallen from her like a frivolous garment, leaving only the simple eternal
lines of her womanhood. Henceforth, whatever he might think, he would not
think of her to-morrow as he had thought yesterday; whatever he felt
to-morrow, his feeling would never lose that purifying touch of tragic
pity. Mrs. Nevill Tyson would never be the same woman that he had known
before. And yet--she was a fool, a fool; and he doubted if her sufferings
would make her any wiser.

Tyson looked at his watch. "Look there, Stanistreet, it's two
o'clock--there must be some blundering. I'll speak to Baker. What are
those damned doctors thinking of! Why can't they have done with it? Why
can't they put her under chloroform?"

One by one the lamps over the billiard-table died down and went out; the
firelight leapt and started on the wall, making the gloom of the great
room visible; in the half-darkness Tyson became clairvoyant, and his
self-reproach grew dominant and clamorous. "It's all my fault--if she
dies it'll be my fault! But how was I to know? How could I tell that
anything like this would happen? I swear I'd die rather than let her go
through this villainy a second time. It's infamous--I'll kill myself
before it happens again!" He flung himself on the sofa and turned his
face to the wall, muttering invectives, blasphemies--a confused furious
arraignment of the finite and the Infinite.

At three o'clock the doctors sent for him. When he came back he was very
silent. He lay down again quietly, and from time to time his lips moved,
whether in imprecation or prayer it was hard to say; but it struck
Stanistreet that Tyson's mind had veered again to the orthodoxy of
terror.

There was silence overhead too. They were putting her under chloroform.

Another hour and the window-panes glimmered as if a tissue of liquid air
were spread between them and the darkness. There was a break in the night
outside, a livid streak of dawn; the objects i