of terror lest the silk fastenings of the artery should break
away. Indeed there was only one fashion in which she could quiet him,
and that was by placing her slim white hand upon his forehead or giving
it to him to hold. Oddly enough, this had more effect upon his fevered
mind than anything else. For hour after hour she would sit thus, though
her arm ached, and her back felt as if it were about to break in two,
till at last she was rewarded by seeing his wild eyes cease their
wanderings and close in peaceful sleep.

Yet with it all that week was perhaps the happiest time in her life.
There he lay: the man she loved with all the intensity of her deep
nature, and she ministered to him, and felt that he loved her, and
depended on her as a babe upon its mother. Even in his delirium her
name was continually on his lips, and generally with some endearing term
before it. She felt in those dark hours of doubt and sickness as though
they two were growing life to life, knit up in a divine identity she
could not analyse or understand. She felt that it was so, and she
believed that, once being so, whatever her future might be, that
communion could never be dissolved, and therefore was she happy, though
she knew that his recovery meant their lifelong separation. For though
Jess, when thrown utterly off her balance, had once given her passion
way, it was not a thing she meant to repeat. She had, she knew, injured
Bessie enough already in taking her future husband's heart. That she
could not help now, but she would take no more. John should go back to
her sister.

And so she sat and gazed at that sleeping man through the long watches
of the night, and was happy. There lay her joy. Soon they must part and
she would be left desolate; but whilst he lay there he was hers. It was
passing sweet to her woman's nature to place her hand upon him and see
him sleep, for this desire to watch the sleep of a beloved object is one
of the highest and strangest manifestations of passion. Truly, and with
a keen insight into the human heart, has the poet said that there is no
joy like the joy of a woman watching what she loves asleep. As Jess sat
and gazed those beautiful and tender lines came floating to her mind,
and she thought how true they were:

For there it lies, so tranquil, so beloved,
All that it hath of life with us is living;
So gentle, stirless, helpless, and unmoved,
And all unconscious of the joy 'tis giving;