But that was his last effort to be superior to the crisis, to pretend that the bitterness of death was any less to him than to any other human creature, to conceal that he needed help, all the help that he could get.

And Adelaide gave him help.  Artificial as she often was in daily contact, in a moment like this she was splendidly, almost primitively real.  She did not conceal her own passionate despair, her conviction that her life couldn’t go on without his; she did not curb her desire to know every detail on which his opinion and his doctor’s had been founded; she clung to him and wept, refusing to let him discuss business arrangements, in which for some reason he seemed to find a certain respite; and yet with it all, she gave him strength, the sense that he had an indissoluble and loyal companion in the losing fight that lay before him.

Once she was aware of thinking:  “Oh, why did he tell me to-night?  Things are so terrible by night,” but it was only a second before she put such a thought away from her.  What had these nights been to him?  The night when she had found his light burning so late, and other nights when he had probably denied himself the consolation of reading for fear of rousing her suspicions.  She did not attempt to pity or advise him, she did not treat him as a mixture of child and idiot, as affection so often treats illness.  She simply gave him her love.

Toward morning he fell asleep in her arms, and then she stole back to her own room.  There everything was unchanged, the light still burning, her satin slippers stepping on each other just as she had left them.  She looked at herself in the glass; she did not look so very different.  A headache had often ravaged her appearance more.

She had always thought herself a coward, she feared death with a terrible repugnance; but now she found, to her surprise, that she would have light-heartedly changed places with her husband.  She had much more courage to die than to watch him die—­to watch Vincent die, to see him day by day grow weak and pitiful.  That was what was intolerable.  If he would only die now, to-night, or if she could!  It was at this moment that the kitchen maid had heard her sobbing.

Because there was nothing else to do, she got into bed, and lay there staring at the electric light, which she had forgotten to put out.  Toward seven she got up and gave orders that Mr. Farron was not to be disturbed, that the house was to be kept quiet.  Strange, she thought, that he could sleep like an exhausted child, while she, awake, was a mass of pain.  Her heart ached, her eyes burned, her very body felt sore.  She arranged for his sleep, but she wanted him to wake up; she begrudged every moment of his absence.  Alas! she thought, how long would she continue to do so?