The door across the hail opened and they brought Connie out, breathing quietly and still unconscious.  He followed the stretcher downstairs; but after they had placed her upon the bed, he came back again and sat down, as before, in the little stuffy room.  Presently he would go home, he thought, but as the night wore on, he became too exhausted for further effort, and closing his eyes at last, he fell heavily asleep.

When he awoke the day was already breaking, and the electric light burned dimly in the general wash of grayness.  About him the atmosphere had a strangely sketchy effect, as if it had been laid on crudely with a few strokes from a paint brush.

The window was still open, and going over to it he leaned out and stood for several minutes, too tired to make the necessary effort to collect his thoughts, while he looked across the sleeping city to the pale amber dawn which was beginning to streak the sky with colour.  The silence was very great; in the faint light the ordinary objects upon which he gazed—­the familiar look of the houses and the streets—­appeared to him less the forms of a material substance than the result of some shadowy projection of mind.  All the earth and sky showed suddenly as belonging to this same transient manifestation of thought; and gradually, as he stood there, his perceptions were reinforced by a sense which is not that of the eye nor of the ear.  He neither saw nor heard, yet he felt that the spirit had moved toward him on the face of the dawn; and the “I” was not more evident to his illumined consciousness than was the “Thou.”  He beheld God, with the vision which is beyond vision; the light of his eyes, the breath of his body were less plain to him than was the mystery of his soul.  And the universal life, he saw—­spirit and matter, fibre and impulse, vibration of atom and quiver of aspiration—­was but an agonised working out into this consciousness of God.  With the revelation his own life was changed as by a miracle of nature; right became no longer difficult, but easy; and not the day only, but his whole existence and the end to which it moved were made as clear to him as the light before his eyes.

Again he thought of Laura, still under the troubled radiance of her illusion, and his heart dissolved in sympathy, not for her only, but for all mankind—­for Kemper, whom she loved, for Gerty, for Connie, for Perry Bridewell.  “They seek for happiness, but it is mine,” he thought; “and because they seek it first, it will keep away from them forever.  It is not to be found in pleasure, nor in the desire of any object, nor in the fulfilment of any love—­for I, who have none of these things, am happier than they.”

He turned away from the window toward the door, and it was at this instant that one of the nurses ran up to him.

“We thought you had gone home,” she said, “so we have rung you up by telephone for an hour—­” She stopped and paused hesitating for an instant; then meeting the quiet question in his look, she added simply, “Your wife died, still unconscious, an hour ago.”