cult had become to him as familiar as the
breath he drew.

"It is all over now--there is nothing but quiet here," he said.

She lay still instantly at his words, her face half hidden in the
cushions of the sofa; and turning from her he went into the dining-room
and brought back a glass of wine and some bread and milk. As he fed her,
she opened her lips with a little humble, tired movement which was
utterly unlike the Connie whom he remembered. Was it possible that in
her degradation she had learned the first rare grace of spirit which is
meekness?

"Take it all, every drop," he said once, when she would have pushed the
spoon away; and turning obediently, she swallowed the last drops of
milk.

"It is very good," she murmured as he rose to put down the emptied
bowl. The words brought a quick moisture of recollection to his eyes,
and he found himself asking if the time had come at last when Connie
could find pleasure in the taste of bread and milk?

After this she lay motionless on the floor until he carried her upstairs
and placed her upon the bed as he had done so often on her past reckless
nights. But there was no remembrance in his mind now of that former
service; and as he turned on the electric light and drew the blankets
over her shivering body, he was hardly surprised even by the readiness
with which events, left perfectly alone, had managed to adjust
themselves. Why he had acted as he had done, he could not have told; had
he stopped to think of it he would probably have said that he had seen
no other way. Connie as his wife, as the mother even of his dead child,
had come to mean nothing to him any more; but Connie as something far
deeper than this--as the object of inexhaustible compassion, as the
tragedy of mortal failure--possessed now a significance which no human
relation could cover by a name. Beyond the abandoned wife, he could
see--not less clearly than on that night when he had waited in the snow
outside the opera house--the small terrified soul caught in a web of
circumstance from which there was no escape.

Standing at daybreak in the centre of his study floor, he remembered the
last humble look with which she had closed her eyes; and he saw in it a
gratitude that was like the first faint dawning of the daybreak. For the
first time in his life he had watched in Connie's eyes the struggle for
consciousness which was as the struggle of an animal in whom a soul had
come painfully to birth; and the me