Book Four—Chapter Thirty Eight.

Sleep was long in coming to Esmé that night.

She lay in the little bed in the room where, as a girl, she had slept soundly in the untroubled days before love had entered into her life, lay wide-eyed in the hot stillness, with the heavy scent of the oleander stealing into the room, perfuming the night, filling the little garden and the surrounding air with its sweetness, bringing back with its familiar fragrance a rush of memories, shy sweet memories of the days when Paul was her lover and she slept with his letters beneath her pillow and sometimes dreamed of him.

So much had happened since those care-free days to change her, to alter all her views of life, that the girl who had slept there before seemed almost a stranger to her. One quality they shared in common; there was one flaming harmony across their sky amid the wind-swept clouds of discontent and passing griefs and early intolerances, love. The girl had lain there and dreamed of love, and felt love aglow in her heart; the woman lay there with heart and brain filled with love—compassionate love, deep and tender and protective in quality—for her husband, for the man who loved her as a husband, and for the small life which God had given her to complete her world.

These three lives, so intimately and closely associated with her own, asserted each its separate claim. Never could she forget, or cease to think kindly and with grateful heart, of the man who was the father of her child. She would love the child more tenderly through her undying affection for George Sinclair. The child forged a link, as he had said, between them for all time.

But above and beyond everything, like a sun set in the sky amid the lesser luminaries, shone her love for Paul Hallam; a great white flame of love that made the crown and glory of her life.

As she thought of Paul, of his struggle and his suffering, her tears fell freely. His claim was stronger than the other claims, his need of her the greater.

With the dawn her mind became more tranquil, less feverishly alert; the curtain of formless thoughts, of futile striving to understand, hung away from her weary brain; and sleep came to her, calm and peaceful sleep, blotting out the sorrows and the joys which go to the making of every life.