She clung to him, shuddering, sobbing, imploring, moaning again that she was afraid, beseeching him to keep off the horror—­not to let it come any nearer—­not to let it look her in the eyes.  The spasm ended at last in a wild burst of tears, while she shrieked out frantically in a terror that was pitiable and abject.  Her hallucinations seemed to have got entirely beyond the control of reason, and as she crouched, with drawn up knees and quivering arms, among the pillows she looked like some small helpless, distracted mortal in the grasp of the avenging furies.  At the moment she seemed to him less his wife than his child.

“Listen to me, Connie,” he said presently in a voice whose quiet authority silenced for an instant her despairing moans.  “You haven’t a trouble on earth that I am not willing to share and I am sharing this—­I have made it mine this very minute.  Whatever there is to face, I’ll face it for you, so get this into your head and go to sleep.  Nothing can get to you—­neither man nor devil—­until it has first passed by me.  There, now—­don’t sob so; don’t, you’ll hurt yourself.  There’s nothing to cry about—­it’s all a false alarm.”

“I’m so afraid,” she repeated over and over again, as she clung to him.  “Promise not to leave me an instant—­not to take your hands off of me.  If I am left alone again I shall die of fear.”

“You shall not be alone, I swear it,” he answered with cheerful assurance.  “Lie quiet and I’ll sit here the whole blessed night if it’s any comfort.”

“It is a comfort,” she answered; and her words entered his ears with a piercing sweetness, which was not unlike the sweetness of love.  Love it was indeed, he knew now, but a love so sexless, so dispassionate that its joys were like the joys of religion.  The tenderness that flooded his breast was less the emotion of man for woman than of the soul for the soul, and the wife whom he had ceased to love in the world’s way was nearer to him, more closely, more divinely his, than she had been in the hour of his greatest ecstasy.  The appeal she made to him now, lying there helpless, distraught and unlovely, was an appeal which is woven of the strongest fibres in the heart of man—­the appeal to the immortal soul to arise and discover its immortality.  Connie cried out to him to save her—­to save her from the world, from herself, from the hovering powers of evil, and he knew now that his joy in the hour of her salvation would be as the joy of the angels in heaven.  He would fight for her as he had never fought for his own life, and he felt suddenly that there was nothing upon the earth nor in the sky that was strong enough to contend against the power of his compassion.  All lesser desires or emotions shrank before it and vanished utterly away—­his ambition, his longing for health wherewith to work, the increasing ardour of his love for Laura—­these were as naught before the bond which united him to the terrified, small soul that trembled beneath his