last and least feeling was personal. Sensitive femininity was eclipsed
by self-effacing purpose, and that it was a husband who stood there was
forgotten. The first look that possessed her face was relief;
satisfaction at the presence of the physician obliterated thought of
the man, which only returned in the form of a sub-consciousness that
did not interfere with her words.

"Is he dying--is there any hope?" she cried.

"Grace!" said Fitzpiers, in an indescribable whisper--more than
invocating, if not quite deprecatory.

He was arrested by the spectacle, not so much in its intrinsic
character--though that was striking enough to a man who called himself
the husband of the sufferer's friend and nurse--but in its character as
the counterpart of one that had its hour many months before, in which
he had figured as the patient, and the woman had been Felice Charmond.

"Is he in great danger--can you save him?" she cried again.

Fitzpiers aroused himself, came a little nearer, and examined
Winterborne as he stood. His inspection was concluded in a mere
glance. Before he spoke he looked at her contemplatively as to the
effect of his coming words.

"He is dying," he said, with dry precision.

"What?" said she.

"Nothing can be done, by me or any other man. It will soon be all
over. The extremities are dead already." His eyes still remained
fixed on her; the conclusion to which he had come seeming to end his
interest, professional and otherwise, in Winterborne forever.

"But it cannot be! He was well three days ago."

"Not well, I suspect. This seems like a secondary attack, which has
followed some previous illness--possibly typhoid--it may have been
months ago, or recently."

"Ah--he was not well--you are right. He was ill--he was ill when I
came."

There was nothing more to do or say. She crouched down at the side of
the bed, and Fitzpiers took a seat. Thus they remained in silence, and
long as it lasted she never turned her eyes, or apparently her
thoughts, at all to her husband. He occasionally murmured, with
automatic authority, some slight directions for alleviating the pain of
the dying man, which she mechanically obeyed, bending over him during
the intervals in silent tears.

Winterborne never recovered consciousness of what was passing; and that
he was going became soon perceptible also to her. In less than an hour
the delirium ceased; then there was an interval of somnolent
painlessness and