He could get no further: but his eyes were terribly eloquent; and the silence held them all as in a vice. The awakening woman in Quita gave her courage to break it. "May I go to her?" she pleaded. "And help her . . if one can?" Though the plea was addressed to Desmond, she glanced first at Lenox, and read approval in his eyes. But Desmond shook his head. "That's my business," he answered quietly. He had mastered his voice by now. "I want you to take over charge here. It's a sharp attack. I shan't leave her again, till . . . it's over." And before either of them knew how to answer him, the curtain had fallen heavily behind him. Overwhelming tragedy, striking across their golden hour like a naked sword, wrenched them out of themselves. Without a word Quita knelt down beside her husband, bowing her forehead on the back of his hand. Women of her temperament are little given to the habit of prayer: and her rare communings with the Hidden Soul of Things more often took the form of wordless aspiration, than of direct petition or praise. But now her uplifted soul went out in a passionate appeal to the Great Giver, and the great Taker Away, for the life of the woman whom she had hated so heartily less than three months ago. And Lenox lay looking straight before him, stroking her hair soothingly from time to time. "Desmond is a strong man, a very strong man," he said, as if speaking to himself. "But there's a flaw in his armour just above the heart; and I believe that if any real harm comes to that wife of his, he'll go to pieces, like a wheel with the centre knocked out." CHAPTER XXII. "What Love may do, that dares Love attempt." --Shakspere. It was evening at last: a sullen, breathless evening, heavy with threatening cloud. Since morning Honor Desmond had been fighting for life, against appalling odds; while the man, whose love for her almost amounted to a religion, did all that human skill could devise, which was pitifully little after all, to ease the torturing thirst and pain, to uphold the vitality that ebbed visibly with the ebbing day. But the very vigour of her constitution went against her; for cholera takes strong bold upon the strong. And Desmond never left her for an instant. He seemed to have passed beyond the zone of hunger, thirst, or weariness, to have reached that exalted pitch of suffering where the soul transcends the body's imperious demands, asserts itself, momentarily, for the absolute unconquerable thing it is.