her but
a fainter and even more irregular one heard as one neared the bed.
Sometimes it seemed to stop, then, with a weak gasp, begin again. A
nurse in uniform stood in waiting; an elderly man sat on a chair at the
bedside, listening and looking at his watch, something white and
lifeless lying in his grasp,--Emily Walderhurst's waxen, unmoving hand.
The odour of antiseptics filled the nostrils. Lord Walderhurst drew
near. The speaking sign of the moment was that neither nurse nor doctor
stirred.

Emily lay low upon a pillow. Her face was as bloodless as wax and was a
little turned aside. The Shadow was hovering over it and touched her
closed lids and the droop of her cheek and corners of her mouth. She was
far, far away.

This was what Walderhurst felt first,--the strange remoteness, the
lonely stillness of her. She had gone alone far from the place he stood
in, and which they two familiarly knew. She was going, alone, farther
still. As he stood and watched her closed eyes,--the nice, easily
pleased eyes,--it was they themselves, closed on him and all prosaic
things and pleasures, which filled him most strangely with that sense of
her loneliness, weirdly enough, _hers_, not his. He was not thinking of
himself but of her. He wanted to withdraw her from her loneliness, to
bring her back.

He knelt down carefully, making no sound, stealthily, not removing his
eyes from her strange, aloof face. He slowly dared to close his hand on
hers which lay outside the coverlet. And it was a little chill and
damp,--a little chill.

A power, a force which hides itself in human things and which most of
them know not of, was gathering within him. He was warm and alive, a
living man; his hand as it closed on the chill of hers was warm; his
newly awakened being sent heat to it.

He whispered her name close to her ear.

"Emily!" slowly, "Emily!"

She was very far away and lay unmoving. Her breast scarcely stirred with
the faintness of her breath.

"Emily! Emily!"

The doctor slightly raised his eyes to glance at him. He was used to
death-bed scenes, but this was curious, because he knew the usual
outward aspect of Lord Walderhurst, and its alteration at this moment
suggested abnormal things. He had not the flexibility of mind which
revealed to Dr. Warren that there were perhaps abnormal moments for the
most normal and inelastic personages.

"Emily!" said his lordship, "Emily!"

He did not cease from saying it, in a low yet re