There was a low voice at her door. Alice was gone, and Warren was kneeling beside her. And as she laid one tired arm about his neck, in the dear familiar fashion of the past, and as their eyes met, Rachael felt that all her life had been a preparation for this exquisite minute. "I thought you would like to know that he is sleeping, and we have moved him," Warren said. "In three days you will have him roaring to get up." Tears brimmed Rachael's eyes. "You saved him," she whispered. "YOU saved him; George says so, too. If that fellow down there had given him chloroform, there would have been no chance. Our only hope was to relieve that pressure on his heart, and take the risk of it being too much for him. He's as strong as a bull. But it was a fight! And no one but a woman would have rushed him up here in the rain." Rachael's eyes were streaming. She could not speak. She clung to her husband's hand for a moment or two of silence. "And now, I want to speak to you," Warren said, ending it. "I have nothing to say in excuse. I know--I shall know all my life, what I have done. It is like a bad dream." His uncertain voice stopped. Husband and wife looked full at each other, both breathing quickly, both faces drawn and tense. "But, Rachael," Warren went on, "I think, if you knew how I have suffered, that you would--that some day, you would forgive me. I was never happy. Never anything but troubled and excited and confused. But for the last few months, in this empty house, seeing other men with their wives, and thinking what a wife you were--It has been like finding my sight--like coming out of a fever--" He paused. Rachael did not speak. "I know what I deserve at your hands," Warren said. "Nobody--nobody--not old George, not anyone--can think of me with the contempt and the detestation with which I think of myself! It has changed me. I will never--I can never, hold up my head again. But, Rachael, you loved me once, and I made you happy--you've not forgotten that! Give me another chance. Let me show you how I love you, how bitterly sorry I am that I ever caused you one moment of pain! Don't leave me alone. Don't let me feel that between you and me, as the years go by, there is going to be a widening gulf. You don't know what the loneliness means to me! You don't know how I miss my wife every time I sit down to dinner, every time I climb into the car. I think of the years to come--of what they might have been, of what they will be without you! And I can't bear it. Why, to go down with you and the boys to Clark's Hills, to tell you about my work, to take you to dinner again--my God! it seems to me like Heaven now, and I look back a few years, when it was all mine, and wonder if I have been sane, wonder if too much work, and all the other responsibilities, of the boys, and Mother's death, and the estate, and poor little Charlie, whether I really wasn't a little twisted mentally!"