ed the
door opened, and turning at the sound he found himself face to face with
his wife.

He had not reflected that Justine would be in her nurse's dress; and the
sight of the dark blue uniform and small white cap, in which he had
never seen her since their first meeting in the Hope Hospital,
obliterated all bitter and unhappy memories, and gave him the illusion
of passing back at once into the clear air of their early friendship.
Then he looked at her and remembered.

He noticed that she had grown thinner than ever, or rather that her
thinness, which had formerly had a healthy reed-like strength, now
suggested fatigue and languor. And her face was spent, extinguished--the
very eyes were lifeless. All her vitality seemed to have withdrawn
itself into the arch of dense black hair which still clasped her
forehead like the noble metal of some antique bust.

The sight stirred him with a deeper pity, a more vehement compunction;
but the impulse to snatch her to him, and seek his pardon on her lips,
was paralyzed by the sense that the three women in the window had
stopped talking and turned their heads toward the door.

He held his hand out, and Justine's touched it for a moment; then he
said in a low voice: "Is there no other place where I can see you?"

She made a negative gesture. "I am afraid not to-day."

Ah, her deep sweet voice--how completely his ear had lost the sound of
it!

She looked doubtfully about the room, and pointed to a sofa at the end
farthest from the windows.

"Shall we sit there?" she said.

He followed her in silence, and they sat down side by side. The matron
had drawn up a chair and resumed her whispered conference with the women
in the window. Between the two groups stretched the bare length of the
room, broken only by a few arm-chairs of stained wood, and the
marble-topped table covered with magazines.

The impossibility of giving free rein to his feelings developed in
Amherst an unwonted intensity of perception, as though a sixth sense had
suddenly emerged to take the place of those he could not use. And with
this new-made faculty he seemed to gather up, and absorb into himself,
as he had never done in their hours of closest communion, every detail
of his wife's person, of her face and hands and gestures. He noticed how
her full upper lids, of the tint of yellowish ivory, had a slight bluish
discolouration, and how little thread-like blue veins ran across her
temples to the roots of