d told him that she would rather he came no
farther.

"I can bear everything better alone now," she said; and so when they
carried her inside he turned away and entered the little waiting room
at the other end of the hall. The place stifled him with the odours of
chloroform and ether, and going to the window, he threw open the blinds
and leaned out into the street. With the first breath of air in his
face, he realised that it was he, and not Connie, who had turned coward
at the end; and he wondered if it were merely waning vitality which had
assumed in her an appearance of such natural dignity. She had lived her
life in terror of imaginary horrors and now in presence of the actual
suffering she could show herself to be absolutely unafraid. Not she but
he, himself, now shivered at the thought of her unconscious body in the
surgeon's hands, and he felt that it would be a positive relief to
change places with her at the instant--to confront in her stead either
the returning pangs of consciousness or the greater mystery of her
unawakening.

In the small, newly painted room, which smelt of chloroform and varnish,
he sat staring through the half open door to the hall where a surgeon,
wearing a shirt with roiled-up sleeves, had just hurried by. A nurse
passed carrying a basin from which a light steam rose; then a young
doctor with a brown leather bag, and presently a second surgeon, who
walked rapidly, and turned up his cuffs over his fat arms, just before
he reached the threshold.

Connie was no longer his wife, Adams had told himself; and yet this fact
seemed not in the least to lessen the importance of the news which he
awaited. For the first time he understood clearly how trivial are any
mere social relations between man and woman.

Then, while he watched the hand of the clock on the mantel drag slowly
around the great staring face, he compelled his thoughts gradually to
detach themselves from her helpless body, as it lay outstretched on the
table across the hall, and to regather about the girlish figure he had
first seen under cherry coloured ribbons. The old vibrant emotion was
but ashes; try as he would he could bring back but a pale memory of that
golden moment; and this emptiness where there had once been life,
lessened forever in his mind the value of all purely human passion. But
his personal attitude to her was lost suddenly in his wider regret that
such tragedies were possible--that the girl with the delicate