I swear it," he answered with cheerful
assurance. "Lie quiet and I'll sit here the whole blessed night if it's
any comfort."

"It is a comfort," she answered; and her words entered his ears with a
piercing sweetness, which was not unlike the sweetness of love. Love it
was indeed, he knew now, but a love so sexless, so dispassionate that
its joys were like the joys of religion. The tenderness that flooded his
breast was less the emotion of man for woman than of the soul for the
soul, and the wife whom he had ceased to love in the world's way was
nearer to him, more closely, more divinely his, than she had been in the
hour of his greatest ecstasy. The appeal she made to him now, lying
there helpless, distraught and unlovely, was an appeal which is woven of
the strongest fibres in the heart of man--the appeal to the immortal
soul to arise and discover its immortality. Connie cried out to him to
save her--to save her from the world, from herself, from the hovering
powers of evil, and he knew now that his joy in the hour of her
salvation would be as the joy of the angels in heaven. He would fight
for her as he had never fought for his own life, and he felt suddenly
that there was nothing upon the earth nor in the sky that was strong
enough to contend against the power of his compassion. All lesser
desires or emotions shrank before it and vanished utterly away--his
ambition, his longing for health wherewith to work, the increasing
ardour of his love for Laura--these were as naught before the bond which
united him to the terrified, small soul that trembled beneath his hands.
And immediately that goodness at which Kemper or Perry Bridewell would
have laughed--the goodness which is spirit, which both builds and
destroys, which knows no law except the divine law of its own being; in
which there is neither the whitened surface nor the loud
self-glorification of the Pharisee--the goodness which is a pure flame,
a consuming passion--this appeared to his eyes in all its alluring
beauty. The way of it was hard, he knew, a way of service, of
self-sacrifice, and yet the one way of happiness as well. This lesson he
had learned from himself--for it is the thing that no man can teach
another--and because it had come to him from himself he knew that it had
come to him from God.

"I made a plan on the way home to-night," he said, keeping his firm
touch upon her throbbing temples. "To-morrow I shall arrange for a
fortnight's absence at the