He was gone so long that Gabriella, crushing down the revolt of her nerves, went to the door, and opening it very gently, looked cautiously into the room.  The window was wide open to the night, where the snow was still falling, and beside the candlestand at the head of the bed the nurse was filling a hypodermic syringe from a teaspoon.  By the open window O’Hara stood inhaling the frosty air; and Gabriella crossed the floor so silently that he did not notice her presence until he turned to watch the nurse give the injection.

Then he said in a whisper:  “You’d better go out.  You can’t do any good.”  But she made an impatient gesture of dissent, and stopping between the bed and the wall, waited while the nurse bared George’s arm and inserted the point of the needle.  He was lying so motionless that she thought at first that he was already dead; but presently he stirred faintly, a shiver ran through the thin arm on the sheet, and a low, half-strangled moan escaped from his lips.  Had she come upon him in a hospital ward, she knew that she should not have recognized him.  He was not the man she had once loved; he was not the father of her children; he was only a stranger who was dying in her house.  She could feel nothing while she looked down at him.  When she tried to remember her young love she could recall but a shadow.  That, too, was dead; that, too, had not left even a memory.

As she bent there above him she made an effort to remember what he had once been, to recall his face as she had first seen it, to revive the burning radiance of that summer when they had been lovers.  But a gray veil of forgetfulness wrapped the past; and her mind, when she tried to bring back the emotions of seventeen years ago, became vacant.  For so long she had stoically put the thought of that past out of her life, that when she returned to it now, she found that only ashes remained.  Then a swift stab of pity pierced her heart like a blade, and she saw again, not George her lover, not George her husband, but the photograph Mrs. Fowler had shown her of the boy in velvet clothes with the wealth of curls over his lace collar.  So it was that boy who lay dying like a stranger in the bed of his son!

She turned hurriedly and went out without speaking, without looking back when she opened the door.

“If one could only understand it,” she said aloud as she entered the sitting-room; and then, with a start of surprise, she realized that O’Hara had followed her.  “You walked so softly I didn’t hear you,” she explained.

“The rugs are thick, and I have on slippers.  My boots were soaking when I came in, and I’d just taken them off when you called.”

They sat down again in front of the fire; and while she stared silently at the flames, with her chin on her hand and her elbow on the arm of the chair, he burst out so unexpectedly that she caught her breath in a gasp: 

“You didn’t know that I was married, too, did you?” His words, and even more than his words, his voice, filled with suppressed emotion, awoke her from her reverie in which she had been dreaming of Arthur.