She sat still, speechless, motionless.  She had not expected either his prompt denial of her position or its powerful effect on him physically.  Never before had she seen John show any symptoms of illness, and his sudden collapse of bodily endurance, his evident suffering and deliberate walk frightened her.  She feared he might have a fit and fall downstairs.  Colonel Booth had found his death in that way when he heard of his son’s accident on the railway.  “All Yorkshiremen,” she mused, “are so full-blooded and hot-blooded, everything that does not please them goes either to their brains or their hearts—­and John has a heart.”  Yes, she acknowledged John had a heart, and then wondered again what made him so anxious to have children.

But with all her efforts to make a commonplace event of her husband’s great sorrow, she did not succeed in stifling the outcry in her own heart.  She whispered to it to “Be still!” She promised to make up for it, even to undo it, sometime; but the Accuser would not let her rest, and when exhaustion ended in sleep, chastised her with distracting, miserable dreams.

John walked slowly upstairs, but he had no thought of falling.  He knew that something had happened to the Inner Man, and he wanted to steady and control him.  It was not Jane’s opinions; it was not public opinion, however widespread it might be.  It was the blood of generations of good men and good women that roused in him a passionate protest against the destruction of their race.  His private sense of injustice and disloyalty came later.  Then the iron entered his soul and it was on this very bread of bitterness he had now to feed it; for on this bread only could he grow to the full stature of a man of God.  His heart was bruised and torn, but his soul was unshaken, and the hidden power and strength of life revealed themselves.

First he threw all anger behind him.  He thought of his wife with tenderness and pity only.  He made himself recall her charm and her love.  He decided that it would be better not to argue the fatal subject with her again.  “No man can convince a woman,” he thought.  “She must be led to convince herself.  I will trust her to God.  He will send some teacher who cannot fail.”  Then he thought of the days of pleasantness they had passed together, and his heart felt as if it must break, while from behind his closed eyelids great tears rolled down his face.

This incident, though so natural, shocked him.  He arrested such evident grief at once and very soon he stood up to pray.  So prayed the gray fathers of the world, Terah and Abram, Lot and Jacob; and John stood at the open window with his troubled face lifted to the starlit sky.  His soul was seeking earnestly that depth in our nature where the divine and human are one, for when the brain is stupefied by the inevitable and we know not what to abandon and what to defend, that is the sanctuary where we shall find help for every hour of need.