ack, and the door yielded to her.

Without an instant's hesitation she entered the room. Though the door
was open--though so short a time had elapsed since the fourth Pouring
that but little more than half the contemplated volume of gas had been
produced as yet--the poisoned air seized her, like the grasp of a hand
at her throat, like the twisting of a wire round her head. She found him
on the floor at the foot of the bed: his head and one arm were toward
the door, as if he had risen under the first feeling of drowsiness,
and had sunk in the effort to leave the room. With the desperate
concentration of strength of which women are capable in emergencies, she
lifted him and dragged him out into the corridor. Her brain reeled as
she laid him down, and crawled back on her knees to the room to shut out
the poisoned air from pursuing them into the passage. After closing the
door, she waited, without daring to look at him the while, for strength
enough to rise and get to the window over the stairs. When the window
was opened, when the keen air of the early winter morning blew steadily
in, she ventured back to him and raised his head, and looked for the
first time closely at his face.

Was it death that spread the livid pallor over his forehead and his
cheeks, and the dull leaden hue on his eyelids and his lips?

She loosened his cravat and opened his waistcoat, and bared his throat
and breast to the air. With her hand on his heart, with her bosom
supporting his head, so that he fronted the window, she waited the
event. A time passed: a time short enough to be reckoned by minutes
on the clock; and yet long enough to take her memory back over all her
married life with him--long enough to mature the resolution that now
rose in her mind as the one result that could come of the retrospect. As
her eyes rested on him, a strange composure settled slowly on her face.
She bore the look of a woman who was equally resigned to welcome the
chance of his recovery, or to accept the certainty of his death.

Not a cry or a tear had escaped her yet. Not a cry or a tear escaped her
when the interval had passed, and she felt the first faint fluttering of
his heart, and heard the first faint catching of the breath of his lips.
She silently bent over him and kissed his forehead. When she looked up
again, the hard despair had melted from her face. There was something
softly radiant in her eyes, which lit her whole countenance as with an
inner ligh