Jean listened to his footfall on the steps, on the sidewalk; the nervous, irritable, uneven sound softened and ceased. She was quite awake, and her mind moved with feverish vitality. She was usually a good sleeper for a sick person; but that night she found herself too ill for any form of rest. The difficulty that she had in breathing increased with an insidious slowness which she had learned to fear as the most obstinate form of her malady. The room grew empty of air. The candle burned blue to her eyes. The shutting of the front door seemed like the shutting of that to which she would not give a name, for terror's sake. As her husband's footsteps passed from the power of her strained ears to overtake them, she found herself wondering how they would sound when they passed for the last time from her presence, she lying under a load of flowers, with the final look of the sky turned compassionately upon her. Then she scorned herself--she was the most healthy-minded invalid who ever surmounted the morbidness of physical suffering--and thrust out her hands from her face, as if she were thrusting a camera which was using defective plates away from her brain. "If he had only come in a minute!" she said, sobbing a little. "If he had only come in and kissed me good-night"-- She did not add: "He would have seen that I was too ill. He would not have left me." The candle burned faintly, and grew more faint. There seemed to be smoke in the room. The baby stirred in his crib, and Pink, from the nursery, called, "Mummer dee!" in her sleep. The air grew so dense that it seemed to Jean to be packed about her like smothering wool. She rang the electric bell for Molly, or she thought she did. But Molly did not answer, and the nursery door was shut. There was nothing morbid in Jean's thoughts by this time; no more gruesome vision; no touching situation whatever presented itself; she did not see herself as a pathetic object; even her husband vanished from her consciousness. Kind or harsh--retreating footsteps or returning arms--light laughter on his lips or true love in his eyes--she thought of him not at all. He disappeared from her emergency like some diminishing figure that had fled from the field of a great battle. For the lonely woman knew now, at last, that she was wrestling with mortal peril. She had always wondered if she would know it from its counterfeits when it really came--there were so many counterfeits! She had asked, as all men ask, what it would be like. A long contention? A short, sharp thrust? Agony? Stupor? Struggle, or calm? Now she wondered not at all. There was nothing dramatic or exciting, or even solemn, in her condition. All her being resolved itself into the simple effort to get her breath.