“Don’t forget,” she had said.  “Our Father which art in Heaven.  Don’t let anyone forget.  Hallowed be thy name.”

The man, leaning upon his shaking hands before him, stood there, for these moments at least, a harrowed thing.  Not a single individual of his acquaintance would have known him.

“I want to see her before the breath leaves her,” he gave forth in a harsh, broken whisper.  “I want to speak.  Let me see her.”

Dr. Warren left his chair slowly.  Out of a thousand chances against her, might this one chance be for her,—­the chance of her hearing, and being called back to the shores she was drifting from, by this stiff, conventional fellow’s voice.  There was no knowing the wondrousness of a loving human thing, even when its shackles were loosening themselves to set it free.

“I will speak to those in charge with me,” he said.  “Will you control every outward expression of feeling?”

“Yes.”

Adjoining Lady Walderhurst’s sleeping apartment was a small boudoir where the medical men consulted together.  Two of them were standing near the window conversing in whispers.

Walderhurst merely nodded and went to wait apart by the fire.  Ceremony had ceased to exist.  Dr. Warren joined the pair at the window.  Lord Walderhurst only heard one or two sentences.

“I am afraid that nothing, now, can matter—­at any moment.”

* * * * *

Those who do not know from experience what he saw when he entered the next room have reason to give thanks to such powers as they put trust in.

There ruled in the large, dim chamber an awful order and silence.  The faint flickering of the fire was a marked sound.  There was no other but a fainter and even more irregular one heard as one neared the bed.  Sometimes it seemed to stop, then, with a weak gasp, begin again.  A nurse in uniform stood in waiting; an elderly man sat on a chair at the bedside, listening and looking at his watch, something white and lifeless lying in his grasp,—­Emily Walderhurst’s waxen, unmoving hand.  The odour of antiseptics filled the nostrils.  Lord Walderhurst drew near.  The speaking sign of the moment was that neither nurse nor doctor stirred.

Emily lay low upon a pillow.  Her face was as bloodless as wax and was a little turned aside.  The Shadow was hovering over it and touched her closed lids and the droop of her cheek and corners of her mouth.  She was far, far away.

This was what Walderhurst felt first,—­the strange remoteness, the lonely stillness of her.  She had gone alone far from the place he stood in, and which they two familiarly knew.  She was going, alone, farther still.  As he stood and watched her closed eyes,—­the nice, easily pleased eyes,—­it was they themselves, closed on him and all prosaic things and pleasures, which filled him most strangely with that sense of her loneliness, weirdly enough, hers, not his.  He was not thinking of himself but of her.  He wanted to withdraw her from her loneliness, to bring her back.