Each day, each hour, Aaron became more anxious and troubled. In the doctor's plain speaking there was no reading between the lines, and no possible mistaking of his meaning. The stern truth had been revealed, and there was no arguing it away. Aaron saw clearly what was before him, but he could not see a way out of his difficulties, nor to doing what he was warned it was imperative upon him that he should do, in the happy event of Rachel's coming safely through her present crisis. There was no apparent change in her; she lay weak and powerless in her bed, receiving Aaron always with sweet and patient words, and nursing her child as well as her feeble state would allow her. The condition of the babe pained and troubled him. He observed no indication of suffering, no querulousness in the child; it was simply that she lay supine, as though life were flowing quietly out of her. Every time Aaron crept up to the bedside and found the babe asleep, he leant anxiously over her to catch the sound of her breathing; and so faint and low was her respiration that again and again he was smitten with a fear that she had passed away. Acutely sensitive and sensible now of every sign in his wife, it became with him an absolute conviction that the doctor was not mistaken when he declared that her life and the life of her babe were inseparable, that if one lived the other would live, that if one died the other would die. During this torturing time strange thoughts oppressed him, and oppressed him more powerfully because he scarcely understood them. The tenor of these thoughts resolved itself into the one passionate desire to do something--he knew not what--to keep his wife with him even if she should lose her babe, and towards the accomplishment of which he felt that a power outside the sphere of human influence was necessary. Normally he was a man of sound understanding, not given to mysticism nor to a belief in the effects of supernatural power upon mundane affairs; but during these agitating days there was a danger of his healthy mind becoming unbalanced. Human resource had failed him; he must seek elsewhere for aid; if he were to be successful in steering his beloved to a haven of peace and health it must be through outside influences which had not yet made themselves visible to him. "Show me the way, O gracious Lord, show me the way!" This was his constant prayer, and although in less agitated times he would have blamed himself for praying for a seeming impossibility, he encouraged himself in it now, in the dim and despairing hope that some miracle would occur to further his agonising desire.