stairs. She
stooped, and picked it up without attention, and stood holding it; she
gesticulated a little with it as she repeated, for her own amusement
rather than for Vincent's, phrases she had caught at dinner.

The horror to Farron of seeing her standing there chattering, with that
death-dealing letter in her hand, suddenly and illogically broke down his
resolution of silence. It was cruel, and though he might have denied
himself her help, he could not endure cruelty.

"Adelaide," he said in a tone that drove every other sensation
away--"Adelaide, that letter. No, don't read it." He took it from her
and laid it on his dressing-table. "My dear love, it has very bad
news in it."

"There _has_ been something, then?"

"Yes. I have been worried about my health for some time. This letter
tells me the worst is true. Well, my dear, we did not enter matrimony
with the idea that either of us was immortal."

But that was his last effort to be superior to the crisis, to pretend
that the bitterness of death was any less to him than to any other human
creature, to conceal that he needed help, all the help that he could get.

And Adelaide gave him help. Artificial as she often was in daily
contact, in a moment like this she was splendidly, almost primitively
real. She did not conceal her own passionate despair, her conviction that
her life couldn't go on without his; she did not curb her desire to know
every detail on which his opinion and his doctor's had been founded; she
clung to him and wept, refusing to let him discuss business arrangements,
in which for some reason he seemed to find a certain respite; and yet
with it all, she gave him strength, the sense that he had an indissoluble
and loyal companion in the losing fight that lay before him.

Once she was aware of thinking: "Oh, why did he tell me to-night? Things
are so terrible by night," but it was only a second before she put such a
thought away from her. What had these nights been to him? The night when
she had found his light burning so late, and other nights when he had
probably denied himself the consolation of reading for fear of rousing
her suspicions. She did not attempt to pity or advise him, she did not
treat him as a mixture of child and idiot, as affection so often treats
illness. She simply gave him her love.

Toward morning he fell asleep in her arms, and then she stole back to
her own room. There everything was unchanged, the light still burning,
he