me new thing to love.
She had nearly died for love--and then when her young strength revived
it had become plain that she could only live for love. Her hands had met
the hands seeking hers, inevitably, instinctively. To refuse, to stand
aloof, to cause pain--that had been the torment, the impossibility, for
one who had learnt so well how to give and to make happy. There was in
it no sensual element--only Augustine's 'love of loving.' Yet her
stricken conscience told her that, in her moral indecision, if the
situation had lasted much longer, she had not been able to make up her
mind to marry Farrell quickly, she might easily have become his
mistress, through sheer weakness, sheer dread of his suffering, sheer
longing to be loved.

Explanations and excuses, for any more seasoned student of human nature,
emerged on every hand. Nelly in her despair allowed herself none of
them. It merely seemed to her, in this night vigil, that she was
unworthy to touch her George, to nurse him, to uphold him; utterly
unworthy of all this reverent pity and affection that was being lavished
upon her for his sake.

She sat up most of the night, wrapped in her fur cloak, alive to any
sound from the room below. And about four in the morning, she stole down
the stairs to listen at his door. There one of the nurses found her, and
moved with pity, brought her in. They settled her in an arm-chair near
him; and then with the tardy coming of the November day, she watched the
sad waking that was so many hours nearer death, at that moment when
man's life is at its wretchedest, and all the forces of the underworld
seem to be let loose upon it.

And there, for five days and nights, with the briefest possible
intervals for food, and the sleep of exhaustion, she sat beside him. She
was dimly conscious of the people about her, of the boundless tenderness
and skill that was poured out upon the poor sufferer at her side; she
did everything for George that the nurses could shew her how to do--; it
was the one grain of personal desire left in her, and doctors and nurses
developed the most ingenious pity in devising things for her to do, and
in letting every remedy that soothed his pain, or cleared his mind, go,
as far as possible, through her hands. And there were moments when she
would walk blindly along the sea beach with Cicely, finding a stimulus
to endure in the sharpness of the winter wind, or looking in vague
wonder at the great distant camp, with its