She was sitting very still, as if she were waiting for something, and yet content. Her eyes were swimming, as if with tears; but there were no tears in them. Her face was reddening, as if with shame, but there was no shame in it. She seemed to be listening, dazed and enchanted, to her own secret, the running whisper of her blood. Her lips were parted, and, as he looked at her, they closed and opened again in sympathy with the delicate tremors that moved her throat under her rounded chin. In her brooding look there was neither reminiscence nor foreboding; it was the look of a creature surrendered wholly to her hour. As he looked at her his nerves sent an arrow of warning, a hot tremor darting from heart to brain. "I must go now, Maggie," he said. When he stood up, his knees shook under him. "Not yet," said Maggie. "I'm all alone in the house, and I'm afraid." "There's nothing to be afraid of," he said roughly. "I've got to go." He strode towards the door while Maggie stared after him in terror. She understood nothing but that he was going to leave her. What had she done to drive him away? "You're ill," she cried, as she followed him, panting in her fright. He pushed her back gently from the threshold. "Don't be a little fool, Maggie. I'm not ill." Out in the street, five yards from Maggie's door, he battled with a vision of her that almost drove him back again. "It was I who was a fool," he thought. "I shall go back. Why not? She is predestined. Why not I as well as anybody else?" All the way to his own door an insistent, abominable voice kept calling to him, "Why not? Why not?" He went with noiseless footsteps up his own stairs, past the dark doors below, past Edith's open door where the lamp still burned brightly beyond the threshold. At Anne's door he paused. It stood ajar in a dim light. He pushed it softly open and went in. Anne and her child lay asleep under the silver crucifix. Peggy had been taken into Anne's bed, and had curled herself close up against her mother's side. Her arm lay on Anne's breast; one hand clutched the border of Anne's nightgown. The long thick braid of Anne's hair was flung back on the pillow, framing the child's golden head in gold. His eyes filled with tears as he looked at them. For a moment his heart stood still. Why not he as well as anybody else? His heart told him why. As he turned he sighed. A sigh of longing and tenderness, and of thankfulness for a great deliverance. Above all, of thankfulness. CHAPTER XXVI The light burned in Edith's room till morning; for her spine kept sleep from her through many nights. They no longer said, "She is better, or certainly no worse." They said, "She is worse, or certainly no better." The progress of her death could be reckoned by weeks and measured by inches. Soon they would be giving her morphia, to make her sleep. Meanwhile she was terribly awake.