She lay still instantly at his words, her face half hidden in the cushions of the sofa; and turning from her he went into the dining-room and brought back a glass of wine and some bread and milk.  As he fed her, she opened her lips with a little humble, tired movement which was utterly unlike the Connie whom he remembered.  Was it possible that in her degradation she had learned the first rare grace of spirit which is meekness?

“Take it all, every drop,” he said once, when she would have pushed the spoon away; and turning obediently, she swallowed the last drops of milk.

“It is very good,” she murmured as he rose to put down the emptied bowl.  The words brought a quick moisture of recollection to his eyes, and he found himself asking if the time had come at last when Connie could find pleasure in the taste of bread and milk?

After this she lay motionless on the floor until he carried her upstairs and placed her upon the bed as he had done so often on her past reckless nights.  But there was no remembrance in his mind now of that former service; and as he turned on the electric light and drew the blankets over her shivering body, he was hardly surprised even by the readiness with which events, left perfectly alone, had managed to adjust themselves.  Why he had acted as he had done, he could not have told; had he stopped to think of it he would probably have said that he had seen no other way.  Connie as his wife, as the mother even of his dead child, had come to mean nothing to him any more; but Connie as something far deeper than this—­as the object of inexhaustible compassion, as the tragedy of mortal failure—­possessed now a significance which no human relation could cover by a name.  Beyond the abandoned wife, he could see—­not less clearly than on that night when he had waited in the snow outside the opera house—­the small terrified soul caught in a web of circumstance from which there was no escape.

Standing at daybreak in the centre of his study floor, he remembered the last humble look with which she had closed her eyes; and he saw in it a gratitude that was like the first faint dawning of the daybreak.  For the first time in his life he had watched in Connie’s eyes the struggle for consciousness which was as the struggle of an animal in whom a soul had come painfully to birth; and the memory of it sent a strange, an almost divine happiness to his heart.  Was it possible that the will of God had moved here while he slept?  Was it possible, he asked himself in an ecstasy of wonder, that in spite of all sin, all failure, all degradation, all despair, he had really won Connie’s soul?

CHAPTER IV

ADAMS WATCHES IN THE NIGHT AND SEES THE DAWN

For a week after her home-coming Connie lay ill and almost unconscious in her chamber.  Since her first wild outburst on the night of her return she had allowed no hint of remorse or gratitude to break through the obstinate silence upon her lips; and the impression she gave Adams, on his occasional visits to her room, was of a soul and body too exhausted for even the slightest emotional activity.  She had made of her life what her desire prompted; and she seemed to suggest now, lying there wrecked and silent, that the end of all self-gratification is in utter weariness of spirit.