And yet it was not Meyrick’s facts exactly that had brought this about. Robert thought them imperfect, only half true. Rather was it the spirit of love, of infinite forbearance in which the simpler, duller nature had declared itself that had appealed to him, nay, reproached him. Then these thoughts led him on further and further from man to God, from human defect to the Eternal Perfectness. Never once during those hours did Elsmere’s hand fail to perform its needed service to the faint sleeper beside him, and yet that night was one long dream and strangeness to him, nothing real anywhere but consciousness, and God its source; the soul attacked every now and then by phantom stabs of doubt, of bitter, brief misgiving, as the barriers of sense between it and the eternal enigma grew more and more transparent, wrestling a while, and then prevailing. And each golden moment of certainty, of conquering faith, seemed to Robert in some sort a gift from Catherine’s hand. It was she who led him through the shades; it was her voice murmuring in his ear. When the first gray dawn began to creep in slowly perceptible waves into the room, Elsmere felt as though not hours but fears of experience lay between him and the beginnings of his watch. ‘It is by these moments we should date our lives’ he murmured to himself as he rose: ‘they are the only real landmarks.’ It was eight o’clock, and the nurse who was to relieve him had come. The results of the night for his charge were good: the strength had been maintained, the pulse was firmer, the temperature lower. The boy, throwing off his drowsiness, lay watching the Rector’s face as he talked in an undertone to the nurse, his haggard eyes full of a dumb, friendly wistfulness. When Robert bent over him to say good-by, this expression brightened into something more positive, and Robert left him, feeling at last that there was a promise of life in his look and touch.