To the end her thoughts were but poor faltering, half-developed things; yet he knew what she meant to say, though she, herself, had divined it only through some pathetic, dumb instinct.

“I think I know what you mean,” he said presently, when it appeared to him that her confession was over; but after he had spoken she took up her sentence with the dead calm in which she had come to rest.

“There’s no use saying that I’m sorry and yet—­I am sorry.”

Her look of weariness was so great that with the words she seemed to lose instantly her remaining strength; and he gathered in her silence, an impression that she was reaching blindly out to him for help.

“Promise me that you will stay with me as long as they will let you?” she implored, with a quick return to her convulsion of childish terror.

He promised readily; but when the time came for her to go, she had entirely recovered her aspect of listless fortitude, and during the short drive to the hospital, she talked, without stopping, of perfectly indifferent subjects—­of the dust in the street, the deserted look of the closed houses, and of the wedding present she wished to buy for a maid who was to be married in the coming week.

“Let it be something really thee,” she asked, and this single request marked for him, as she uttered it, a change in Connie greater than any he had seen before.

At the hospital he expected a relapse into her hysterical dread, but, to his surprise, she watched the surgical preparations with a calmness in which there was a kind of passive curiosity.  While the nurse laid out her nightdress on the small white iron bed, and braided her hair in two long, slender braids, she assisted with a patient attention to such details which seemed hardly to account for the terrible event for which they prepared.  Her hair, he noticed, was combed straight back from her forehead in the fashion in which she might have worn it as a little girl; and this simple change gave her an expression which was almost one of injured innocence.  Age and experience were suddenly wiped out of her face, not by any act of mental illumination, but merely by the ruffles of her white nightdress and the simple childish fashion in which they had combed her hair.

When they came to take her upstairs to the operating room upon the roof, he would have gone also, but after reaching the top landing, she turned to him upon the threshold and told him that she would rather he came no farther.

“I can bear everything better alone now,” she said; and so when they carried her inside he turned away and entered the little waiting room at the other end of the hail.  The place stifled him with the odours of chloroform and ether, and going to the window, he threw open the blinds and leaned out into the street.  With the first breath of air in his face, he realised that it was he, and not Connie, who had turned coward at the end; and he wondered if it were merely waning