d!" he said. "My God! Don't be kind to me ... don't be kind!"

And dreadful sobs began heaving through him.

"Oh ... _poor Cecil_...!" came from her in a gasp.

And then he fell forward on his knees before her, his face in her lap,
his hands grasping the soft folds of her gown. His tumultuous, painful
sobbing shook them both--as if torn up by bloody roots came the great
sobs.

"Sophy.... God.... Sophy.... I've suffered.... I've suffered.... If he'd
died.... Yes ... one shot ... yes ... one...."

And his passion of grief, torrential as his passion of love, flooded
her, shook her with its cyclonic abandonment, until she seemed one flesh
with him in this unmeasured tragedy of wild remorse.

Through her thin gown she felt his tears soak to her very skin--a hot
chrism baptising her once more his in this terrific rite of sorrow.

She bent over him, her hands upon his head, her own tears falling.

"No ... no!" she pleaded. "No ... no, Cecil! Don't ... don't despair
like this ... we will begin again.... The truth.... You have told the
truth...."

She began to sob herself now.

"And the truth shall make you free ... the truth shall make you free,
dear...." she kept sobbing.

Now she had his head against her breast--her cheek pressed down on it.
As she held Bobby to comfort him, when he was frightened, so she held
the great man. He was afraid now--afraid of himself--like a child. Close
she held him to comfort him ... close ... close....

XLI

That night they talked things over quietly. Sophy was very gentle with
him--almost incredibly generous, he thought. With his permission, she
consulted Camenis about the amount of morphia that he ought to have, to
"tail off," as he said humbly--in order to get him back to England
without too much discomfort from the sciatic pains and the sudden
snapping of the habit that he had formed again--albeit to such a
moderate extent. Camenis gave his opinion, and Sophy undertook to give
her husband the properly diminished doses. Chesney was almost
pathetically humble. It hurt her in some subtle nerve to see the big,
domineering man, so subdued, so timidly anxious to conciliate her, to
redeem himself in her opinion. It was beyond doubt that he had suffered
excruciatingly over the boy's illness and his part in it.

"The little chap won't be able to bear the sight of me, I suppose," he
had ventured once, and she saw his lips quiver as he said it.

She felt a submerging pity for