A deep bodeful hush filled her heart. It was as though she had suddenly gone deaf to all the noises of the world, to everything but that one possibility. She was straighter now, no longer crouched and panting. She was on her knees, her hands clasped, her head decently bent, in the familiar attitude of Sunday morning. At last she was praying. A moment later she was running out of the church as though a phantom had risen beside her and laid a skeleton hand on her shoulder ... she had not been praying that Lester ... no, it was not _possible_ that she had been praying that her husband would not get well! But soon she walked more quietly, more at her usual pace. After all she had nothing to go on, nothing to be sure of, nothing really to make her think it very likely that Lester would.... Chapter 21 One of the interests of life for Lester was the uncertainty about who was to be his mental companion for any given day. It seemed to be something over which he had no control. Sometimes he had thought it might be the weather which settled the matter. Not infrequently his first early-morning look at the world told him with which great spirit he was to live that day. A clear, breezy, bird-twittering dawn after rain meant Christina Rossetti’s child-poems. A soft gray down-pour of warm rain, varnishing the grass to brilliance and beating down on the earth with a roll of muted drum-notes, always brought Hardy to his mind. Golden sun spilled in floods over the new green of the quivering young leaves meant Shelley. And Browning was for days when the sun rose rich and many-colored out of confused masses of turbid clouds. But it was not always the weather. Sometimes as he opened his eyes, his chosen comrade for the day was there beside him before he had taken in anything more of the visible world than the white vacancy of the ceiling with those familiar blemishes, which were by this time a part of his brain. He did not always welcome the companion of the day, especially when the unseen spirit but repeated and intensified the color of his own temperament, from which he was so glad to escape by following the trumpets and fanfare of a temperament more brightly, more vividly alive. But he had found it was of little use to try to alter the day’s destiny. He could indeed, easily enough, bring to mind mechanically many others of the blessed company of articulate human beings who sang for him what he could never say for himself; but he could hear, really hear in his deep heart’s core, nothing but the appointed voice. So he resigned himself to a brooding, astringent day when he woke up one morning and even before he opened his eyes, heard, “But ‘falling, falling, falling’ there’s your song, The cradle song that sings you to the grave.”