but he knew now that in her sanest days she felt no stronger sentiment for him than tolerant gratitude.  And during her frantic nights the violence of her detestation was but an added torture.  There were times even, and this was so now, when she sought by bodily force to gain possession of the drug which she had hidden under the carpet or beneath the pillows of the couch, and in order to control her struggles, he was obliged to resort to his greater physical strength.  After this she looked up and cursed him with a wonderful florid, almost oriental splendour of language, while throwing off his coat, he brushed from him the hanging shreds of the torn pink chiffon gown.

At seven o’clock in the morning when the nurse came to relieve him, he was still sitting, as he had sat all night, in a chair beside Connie’s bed.

“So she has had one of her bad attacks, I feared it,” said the nurse, with a sympathetic glance directed less at Connie than at her husband.

“Yes, it was bad,” repeated Adams quietly; and then rising to his feet he staggered like a drunken man into his bedroom across the hall.  Still wearing his evening clothes he flung himself heavily upon the sofa and fell at once into the profound sleep of acute bodily exhaustion.  Two hours later when he awoke to take the coffee which the kindly nurse brought to him, he found that his slumber, instead of refreshing him, had left him sunk in a sluggish melancholy with a clogged and inactive brain.

“She is very quiet now,” said the woman, a tall, strong person of middle age, “and strangely enough the spell has hardly weakened her at all—­she has had her breakfast and speaks of going out for a little shopping after luncheon.”

“Well, that’s good news!” exclaimed Adams heartily, as he hastily swallowed his black coffee.  Then, holding out his cup to be refilled, he shook his head with the winning humorous smile which was his solitary beauty.  “This coffee will have to write two pages in my magazine,” he said, “so pour abundantly, if you please.”

Sitting there in his dishevelled evening clothes, with his thin, sallow face under his rumpled hair, he made hardly an impressive figure even when viewed in the effulgent light of romance as a devoted husband.  There was nothing of the heroic in his appearance; and yet as the nurse looked down upon him she felt something of the curious attraction he had for men like Arnold Kemper or Perry Bridewell—­men whose innate principles of life differed so widely from his own.  It was impossible to build a sentimental fiction about him, she thought—­he had no place among the broad shouldered, athletic gentlemen who bewitched her in the pages of the modern novel—­but she recognised, for the first time, as she stood gravely regarding him, that there could be a love founded upon other attributes than these.  To be loved as he loved Connie seemed to her at the instant a very beautiful and perfect thing.