vitality which had assumed in her an appearance of such natural dignity.  She had lived her life in terror of imaginary horrors and now in presence of the actual suffering she could show herself to be absolutely unafraid.  Not she but he, himself, now shivered at the thought of her unconscious body in the surgeon’s hands, and he felt that it would be a positive relief to change places with her at the instant—­to confront in her stead either the returning pangs of consciousness or the greater mystery of her unawakening.

In the small, newly painted room, which smelt of chloroform and varnish, he sat staring through the half open door to the hail where a surgeon, wearing a shirt with roiled-up sleeves, had just hurried by.  A nurse passed carrying a basin from which a light steam rose; then a young doctor with a brown leather bag, and presently a second surgeon, who walked rapidly, and turned up his cuffs over his fat arms, just before he reached the threshold.

Connie was no longer his wife, Adams had told himself; and yet this fact seemed not in the least to lessen the importance of the news which he awaited.  For the first time he understood clearly how trivial are any mere social relations between man and woman.

Then, while he watched the hand of the clock on the mantel drag slowly around the great staring face, he compelled his thoughts gradually to detach themselves from her helpless body, as it lay outstretched on the table across the hail, and to regather about the girlish figure he had first seen under cherry coloured ribbons.  The old vibrant emotion was but ashes; try as he would he could bring back but a pale memory of that golden moment; and this emptiness where there had once been life, lessened forever in his mind the value of all purely human passion.  But his personal attitude to her was lost suddenly in his wider regret that such tragedies were possible—­that the girl with the delicate babyish face could have become a creature to whom vice was a desired familiar thing.

“Did the outcome lie in my hands? and might I have prevented it?” he demanded.  “If I had stood in the way of her impulse, would it have turned aside from me at the last?” And the salvation of the world appeared to him to depend upon just this courageous coming between evil and the desire which it invited—­for had not the soul of the weak, been delivered, in spite of all moral subterfuge, into the power of the strong?

Then his vision broadened, and he looked from Connie’s life to the lives of men and women who were more fortunate than she; but all human existence, everywhere one and the same, showed to him as the ceaseless struggle after the illusion of a happiness which had no part in any possession nor in any object.  He thought of Laura, with the radiance of her illusion still upon her; of Gerty, groping after the torn and soiled shreds of hers; of Kemper, stripped of his and yet making the pretence that it had not left him naked; of Perry Bridewell, dragging his through the defiling mire that led to emptiness; and then of all the miserable multitude of those that live for pleasure.  And he saw them, one and all, bound to the wheel which turned even as he looked.