She computed the time it might take to harness the gay steeds, and tried to give the rein of her expectation the utmost length.  To her delight she saw the prophet’s horses and the light vehicle he drove upon long journeys emerge into the square.  A servant led them up and down.  At length she saw Smith returning, not with hasty steps, but as if against his will, walking again through the crowded place like a man in a dream.  Men greeted him, but for once he gave no sign of seeing them.  She heard his footstep on the stair.  When he reached her door he almost fell against it in the opening, and staggered as he entered the room as if his self-control had just lasted so far.  He knelt down by one of the fashionable marble-topped tables with which he had graced her room, and, like an ill-conditioned soul, burst into tears and broken complaints.

“But I cannot do it,” he gasped.  “I cannot.”

In her hour of miserable waiting Susannah had thought of many things that might occur, and nerved herself to meet them, but this distemper of soul, this failure of will in the man who had been undaunted through years of persecuting torture, was so wholly unexpected that she stood aghast.

He clenched his hands as they lay helpless on the white table.  “O Lord!” he cried, and she could not tell from the tone whether the words were oath or prayer.  “O Lord, I cannot let her go.”  His thick tears muffled his voice, and still again and again during the paroxysm she caught the words as if reiterated in choking anger, “O Lord, I cannot.”

His tears, however evil their source, laid hold of her woman’s sensibility; she was no longer a critical observer.  She no longer set aside his strange inward conflict as a delusion of madness.  She participated in his consciousness so far as to think that she was actually witnessing the despair of a soul repulsing an opportunity of righteousness, and yet not so far dead as not to know its worth.  She tried to speak, but found herself, as at other times, so affected by his overlapping emotion that she was trembling and had neither courage nor voice.

Smith lifted his head, looking with terror into vacant spaces of the dim room, as if following with his eyes some menacing form.  He whined piteously.  “I have purposed to be faithful”; he put up his hand as if to ward off a blow.  “Thou knowest! thou knowest!” His voice was like a whispering shriek.  The terror of his face and gestures was appalling to see.

Susannah was infected with fear of an apparition so evidently visible to him.  Her mind swung, as it were, out of material limitations.  She was overcome with the belief that a third person was with them, and her heart went out in gratitude to that mysterious other for taking her part.

But the gilt clock on the marble mantelshelf ticked on; Susannah felt herself aware that the person of Smith’s vision was withdrawing, repulsed.  She almost cried aloud to the invisible, but checked the prayer, holding on, as it were, to her own sanity with both hands.  Smith writhed continually, moaning.