Hours passed, hours that seemed a lifetime. The pain extended through her whole frame, and tears of mute suffering dropped slowly down upon the flap of the cape that kept her lover warm. From time to time she shifted her position gently and won a temporary relief, but presently the sense of strain returned, and yet she would not waken him and let him go. It was the first time she had ever seen him asleep,--one of love's tenderest experiences,--and moreover he was sleeping with a sense of absolute peace and security in her arms. She longed to slip down beside him, to rest her cheek against his, and to go with him into that shadowy world of dreams. Suddenly out of the darkness a soft little form, wet with the rain, leaped lightly upon her. The discarded kitten had found its mistress at last. Gentle as the impact was, it sufficed to disturb her balance, and she sank slowly downward in a faint. Her arm, locked about his head, saved her from a fall, but the pressure of her body awoke him. He struggled confusedly, oppressed by a sense of suffocation and by a vague fear; then, scarcely awake, he caught her in his arms. "Lena!" he cried, startled by the inexplicable change. "Lena!" He touched her cheek, he listened in vain to hear her breathe, and then an icy terror gripped his heart. Scarcely knowing what he did or why, he raised her carefully in his arms and carried her to the window, where the fine rain sifted in upon her face. He felt her shiver slightly, and then her eyes were looking into his. "Thank God!" he said brokenly. "I thought that you were dead." She smiled, and moved her face toward him. He took her once more to their former seat, and continued to hold her in his arms as if she were a child. "I feel better now," she murmured. "It was nothing, Tom. You fell asleep, and I held your head until I toppled over--that was all. Were you frightened?" "I thought you were dead," he repeated, deeply awed by the grim spectre so foreign to his experience. "And did you care so very much?" she ventured, her heart beginning to beat high again. For answer he gently raised her cheek to his and held her close. There was no need of words to tell her how much he was moved, for he had never held her thus before. Through her lover's strange moods of fierce tenderness and stern denial she had won her way at last, as she now believed, to a perfect understanding. He could not live without her; it was merely a question of time.