“You think I may not be able to make her understand?”

“I am very sorry.  It is impossible to know.”

“This,” slowly, “is very hard on me.”

“There is something I feel I must tell you, Lord Walderhurst.”  Dr. Warren kept a keen eye on him, having, in fact, felt far from attracted by the man in the past, and wondering how much he would be moved by certain truths, or if he would be moved at all.  “Before Lady Walderhurst’s illness, she was very explicit with me in her expression of her one desire.  She begged me to give her my word, which I could not have done without your permission, that whatsoever the circumstances, if life must be sacrificed, it should be hers.”

A dusky red shot through Walderhurst’s leaden pallor.

“She asked you that?” he said.

“Yes.  And at the worst she did not forget.  When she became delirious, and we heard that she was praying, I gathered that she seemed to be praying to me, as to a deity whom she implored to remember her fervent pleading.  When her brain was clear she was wonderful.  She saved your son by supernatural endurance.”

“You mean to say that if she had cared more for herself and less for the safety of the child she need not have been as she is now?”

Warren bent his head.

Lord Walderhurst’s eyeglass had been dangling weakly from its cord.  He picked it up and stuck it in his eye to stare the doctor in the face.  The action was a singular, spasmodic, hard one.  But his hands were shaking.

“By God!” he cried out, “if I had been here it should not have been so!”

He got up and supported himself against the table with the shaking hands.

“It is very plain,” he said, “that she has been willing to be torn to pieces upon the rack to give me the thing I wanted.  And now, good God in heaven, I feel that I would have strangled the boy with my own hands rather than lose her.”

In this manner, it seemed, did a rigid, self-encased, and conventional elderly nobleman reach emotion.  He looked uncanny.  His stiff dignity hung about him in rags and tatters.  Cold sweat stood on his forehead and his chin twitched.

“Just now,” he poured forth, “I don’t care whether there is a child or not.  I want her—­I care for nothing else.  I want to look at her, I want to speak to her, whether she is alive or dead.  But if there is a spark of life in her, I believe she will hear me.”

Dr. Warren sat and watched him, wondering.  He knew curious things of the human creature, things which most of his confreres did not know.  He knew that Life was a mysterious thing, and that even a dying flame of it might sometimes be fanned to flickering anew by powers more subtle than science usually regards as applicable influences.  He knew the nature of the half-dead woman lying on her bed upstairs, and he comprehended what the soul of her life had been,—­her divinely innocent passion for a self-centred man.  He had seen it in the tortured courage of her eyes in hours of mortal agony.