The ordeal had been too much for Phoebe in her weak condition; she was never to recover from the terror of that minute or hour when she had lain and listened, as she thought, and as he had meant her to think, to Archelaus hanging himself in the passage below.  The child, though born prematurely and for the first few weeks a sickly little creature enough, gradually strengthened, but Phoebe’s life flickered lower each hour.  She did not seem frightened at the approach of death, if she realised it, which was doubtful.  It was as though she had used up all of emotion before and had no strength left to indulge in any now.  That was how Ishmael too had felt all those first hours after his homecoming; but with a short spell of heavy, irresistible sleep the power to feel returned to him, and he was even surprised at the depth to which he felt a pang.  He had not “loved” Phoebe in the sense in which that much-abused word is generally used; he had felt for her a passion which was in itself a reaction and an affection which had diminished and not augmented in their life together.  But intimacy and custom go far towards producing that sense of knowledge of another human being which makes the imagination translate what the other is suffering into terms of self, and that is after all the method by which the most vivid human sympathy is evoked.  He felt he knew her so well—­her aims and ideas, her likes and little gusty hates, her sweetnesses and her pettiness—­that he suffered with her now more acutely than she for herself.

Also, as her life drew out, and that feeling of something focussing, of many tangled threads all being drawn together, which the approach of death gives, took hold of the watchers, all the external things which go to make life fell away from him and the stark roots of it stood out.  This had been his mate, this fragile little thing lying there, her listless eyes not meeting his, her limp fingers not responding to any touch.  She had been nearer to him physically than any other human being, and that she had been further mentally was swamped in that thought in the hour when she was dying of the nearness....  For he had the guilty feeling of the man whose wife dies in childbirth, and though he told himself that whatever passing brute had wantonly hung the harmless dog had brought about this tragedy, that could not altogether absolve him.  His poor little Phoebe—­he had always known her soft heart for animals, but even he had not guessed that the tragedy of Wanda would affect her so—­she who had seen so many animals killed with much less sickening than he himself.

As he sat by the bed there flashed on him an irrational memory of that day in the field when the girls had found a wounded toad amidst the oat-sheaves, and how he had come up to them as they clustered round it in their pale gowns.  It had been Blanche who had been most articulate in her pity, and yet Blanche had not scrupled to hurt him when it suited her.  Phoebe, till these months of irritation and the dislike which had seemed to spring in her, had never wilfully hurt anyone.  He felt he knew all of Phoebe there had been to know, and his heart softened over her as she slipped away from any power of his to tell her so.