he memory of the pity of
her before him--by the time the flame in his lantern had flickered and
died, and the late moon was riding high in the sky. He put on his coat
and went again to the house.

Phoebe's ordeal was not over till broad day had appeared and the usual
sounds of farm-life had perforce begun again. With them there mingled a
fresh note--the cry of the new-born child, insistent, wailing,
plaintive; but the cries of its mother had ceased. She lay silent in her
exhaustion, amid the dim looming of the horror that had encompassed her,
and she showed no interest even in the desired babe that had been laid
in the curve of her arm as she had pictured him not twelve hours before.

The ordeal had been too much for Phoebe in her weak condition; she was
never to recover from the terror of that minute or hour when she had
lain and listened, as she thought, and as he had meant her to think, to
Archelaus hanging himself in the passage below. The child, though born
prematurely and for the first few weeks a sickly little creature enough,
gradually strengthened, but Phoebe's life flickered lower each hour.
She did not seem frightened at the approach of death, if she realised
it, which was doubtful. It was as though she had used up all of emotion
before and had no strength left to indulge in any now. That was how
Ishmael too had felt all those first hours after his homecoming; but
with a short spell of heavy, irresistible sleep the power to feel
returned to him, and he was even surprised at the depth to which he felt
a pang. He had not "loved" Phoebe in the sense in which that
much-abused word is generally used; he had felt for her a passion which
was in itself a reaction and an affection which had diminished and not
augmented in their life together. But intimacy and custom go far towards
producing that sense of knowledge of another human being which makes the
imagination translate what the other is suffering into terms of self,
and that is after all the method by which the most vivid human sympathy
is evoked. He felt he knew her so well--her aims and ideas, her likes
and little gusty hates, her sweetnesses and her pettiness--that he
suffered with her now more acutely than she for herself.

Also, as her life drew out, and that feeling of something focussing, of
many tangled threads all being drawn together, which the approach of
death gives, took hold of the watchers, all the external things which go
to make life fell away