“Ah!” Monck said, and drew the hard breath of a man struggling in deep waters.

Mrs. Ralston returned softly with a white bundle in her arms, and Stella’s hold relaxed.  Her heavy lids brightened eagerly.

“My dear,” Mrs. Ralston said, “the doctor has commanded me to turn your husband out immediately.  He must just peep at the darling baby and go.”

“Tell him to go himself—­to blazes!” said Monck forcibly, and then reached up, still curiously grim to Mrs. Ralston’s observing eyes, and, without rising from his knees, took his child into his arms.

He laid it against the mother’s breast, and tenderly uncovered the tiny, sleeping face.

“Oh, Everard!” she said.

And Mrs. Ralston turned away with a little sob.  She did not believe any longer that Stella would die.  The sweet, thrilling happiness of her voice seemed somehow to drive out the very thought of death.  She had never in her life seen any one so supremely happy.  But yet—­though she was reassured—­there was something else in the atmosphere that disturbed her.  She could not have said wherefore, but she was sorry for Monck—­deeply, poignantly sorry.  She was certain, with that inner conviction that needs no outer evidence, that it was more than weariness and the strain of anxiety that had drawn those deep lines about his eyes and mouth.  He looked to her like a man who had been smitten down in the pride of his strength, and who knew his case to be hopeless.

As for Monck, he went through his ordeal unflinching, suffering as few men are called upon to suffer and hiding it away without a quiver.  All through the hours of his journeying, he had been prepared to face—­he had actually expected—–­ the worst.  All through those hours he had battled to reach her indeed, straining every faculty, resisting with almost superhuman strength every obstacle that arose to bar his progress.  But he had not thought to find her, and throughout the long-drawn-out effort he had carried in his locked heart the knowledge that if when he came at last to her bedside he found her—­this woman whom he loved with all the force of his silent soul—­white and cold in death, it would be the best fate that he could wish her, the best thing that could possibly happen, so far as mortal sight could judge, for either.

But so it had not been.  At the very Gate of Death she had waited for his coming, and now he knew in his heart that she would return.  The love between them was drawing her, and the man’s heart in him battled fiercely to rejoice even while wrung with the anguish of that secret knowledge.

He hardly knew how he went through those moments which to her were such pure ecstasy.  The blood was beating wildly in his brain, and he thought of that devils’ tattoo on the roof at Udalkhand when first that dreadful knowledge had sprung upon him like an evil thing out of the night.  But he held himself in an iron grip; he forced his mind to clearness.  Even to himself he would not seem to be aware of the agony that tore him.