t of the unextinguished
lamp shining under the lintel of the consulting-room door, had stolen
timidly down to ask Owen's pardon. Why had she behaved so badly? She could
not explain. Only she was sorry. She must tell him so. His name was upon
her lips, when she saw the Dop Doctor sleeping in his chair.

Breathlessly silent, she crossed the room to his side. And then--it was to
her as though she looked upon her husband's face for the first time.

There was no stain of his secret excess upon it--no bloating of the
features. You would have said this was a sane and strong and temperate
man, upon whom the mighty brother of all-conquering Death had come, like
one armed, and overthrown in the heat and stress of the life-battle. Only
the sorrow of a suffering soul was written as deeply on that pale mask of
human flesh as though the sculptor-slaves of a Pharao, dead seven thousand
years agone, had cut it with tools of unknown, resistless temper in the
diamond-hard Egyptian granite.

He breathed deeply and evenly, and not a muscle twitched as Lynette bent
over and looked at him. A mass of her red-brown hair, heavy with the
weight of its own glossy luxuriance, slipped from her half-bared bosom as
she leaned over him, and fell upon his breast. A sudden blush burned over
her as it fell. He never stirred. But as though the rod of Moses had
touched the rock in Horeb, one slow tear oozed from between Saxham's black
fringed, close-sealed eyelids, and hung there, a burnished, trembling
point of steely light. And the deep, still, manly anguish of his face
cried out to the reawakening womanhood in Lynette, and a strange, new,
overwhelming emotion seized and shook her as a stream of white and liquid
fire seemed to pass into her veins and mingle with her blood.

She began to understand, as she pored, with beating heart and bated
breath, upon the living page before her eyes.

In its reticence and lonely strength of endurance, that face of Saxham's
pleaded with her. In its stern acceptance of suffering and disappointment
for Saxham, in its rugged confrontation of the inevitable; in its resolute
long-suffering and grim patience; in its silent abnegation of any claim
upon her gratitude or any right to demand her tenderness, the face was
more than eloquent to-night. In the pride that would never stoop to beg
for pity--would rather die hungered than accept one crumb of grudged and
measured love; in its secret, inscrutable, unyielding loyalty to