his arms. The babe cried
sleepily from its mother's room. She tenderly disengaged herself, left
him in the door, moved on to the child's crib, and in the dim light of
the bedside taper, facing him from beyond it, soothed the little one by
her silent touch.

To Arthur, wan and frail though she was, the sight was heavenly fair, a
vision of ineffable peace to which it seemed a sacrilege to draw nearer;
but she beckoned, and he stole to the spot. With the quieted babe in its
crib between them, the pair knit arms about each other's neck and
kissed.

"My own! my own at last!" murmured the husband. "I never had you until
now!"

"The cure has worked, dear heart," breathed the wife,--"worked without
surgery, has it not?"

"The cure has worked," he replied,--"worked without the sacrifice. Oh,
the sudden sweet ease of it!"

Whispering a fervent good-night in response to hers, he covered her head
and brows with caresses; then stole away with eyes still fastened on
her, and at the dividing threshold waved a last parting and closed the
door.

XVII

SLEEP, OF A SORT

Isabel went to her couch in great heaviness and agitation. Her sad
confidings to her mother, Minnie's adventure, Arthur's pitiful if not
alarming condition, she strove to reconsider duly and in their order;
but perpetually there interfered, with its every smallest detail
thrillingly clear and strong, that moment which had thrown her once more
into the company, tossed her into the very clutch, of Leonard Byington.
She turned her face into her pillow and prayed God for other thoughts
and visions, and at length, while charging herself to see her mother in
time to postpone the sending of her dispatch to Godfrey, she slept.

Sleep, of a sort, came also to Arthur, though not before many an evil
imagination had come back to tease and sting his galled mind.

What chafed oftenest was the fact that Isabel, had he allowed it, would
have sought to argue down his belief that Leonard loved her. Great
heaven! what must be her feeling toward him, that she should offer to
argue such a question? She might truly deny all knowledge of his
passion, but oh, where were her quick outcries of womanly abhorrence?
Where was the word that Leonard Byington was no more to her than any
other man,--that word which would have been the first to flash from her
if conscience had not stopped it? Twice he sprang up in his bed,
whispering: "They love! They love! Each knows it of the other