They had reached the conservatory, and, entering, it was Piers who led the way. His face, as they emerged into the library, was deathly, but he was absolute master of himself. "I believe there is a meal in the dining-room," he said. "Will you help yourself while I go up?" "No," said Wyndham briefly. "I am coming up with you." He kept a hand upon Piers' arm all the way up the stairs, deliberately restraining him, curbing the fevered impetuosity that urged him with a grim insistence that would not yield an inch to any chafing for freedom. He gave utterance to no further injunctions, but his manner was eloquent of the urgent need for self-repression. When Piers entered his wife's room, that room which he had not entered since the night of Ina's wedding, his tread was catlike in its caution, and all the eagerness was gone from his face. Then only did the doctor's hand fall from him, so that he advanced alone. She was lying on one side of the great four-poster, straight and motionless as a recumbent figure on a tomb. Her head was in deep shadow. He could see her face only in vaguest outline. Softly he approached, and Mrs. Lorimer, rising silently from a chair by the bedside, made room for him. He sat down, sinking as it were into a great abyss of silence, listening tensely, but hearing not so much as a breath. The doctor took up his stand at the foot of the bed. In the adjoining room sat Lennox Tudor, watching ceaselessly, expectantly, it seemed to Piers. Behind him moved a nurse, noiselessly intent upon polishing something that flashed like silver every time it caught his eye. Suddenly out of the silence there came a voice. "If I go down to hell,--Thou art there also. If I take the wings of the morning--the wings of the morning--" There came a pause, the difficult pause of uncertainty--"the wings of the morning--" murmured the voice again. Piers leaned upon the pillow. "Avery!" he said. She turned as if some magic moved her. Her hands came out to him, piteously weak and trembling. "Piers,--my darling!" she said. He gathered the poor nerveless hands into a tight clasp, kissing them passionately. He forgot the silent watcher at the foot of the bed, forgot little Mrs. Lorimer hovering in the shadows, and Tudor waiting with the nurse behind him. They all slipped into nothingness, and Avery--his wife--alone remained in a world that was very dark. Her voice came to him in a weak whisper. "Oh, Piers, I've been--wanting you so!" "My own darling!" he whispered back. "I will never leave you again!" "Oh yes, you will!" she answered drearily. "You always say that, but you are always gone in the morning. It's only a dream--only a dream!" He slipped his arms beneath her and drew her to his breast. "It is not a dream, Avery," he told her very earnestly. "I am here in the flesh. I am holding you." "I know," she said. "It's always so."