The failure...! In the glimmer of that pale, cold dawn I watched the outline of her slumbering form. I remembered her cry of sacrificing love that drew the great rushing Powers down into herself, and thus into the unresisting little body gathered now in growth against her heart. That human love the world deems great, seeking to save him to her own distress, had only blocked the progress of his soul she yearned to protect, so little understanding.... I heard her deep-drawn breathing in the darkness and wondered ... for the child that she would bear ... come to our modern strife and worldly things with this freight of elemental forces linked about his human heart and mind—fierce child of Wind and Fire...! A “natural,” perhaps a “super-natural” being....
This sense of woe and passion, haunting my long, silent vigil from night to dawn, and after it when the sunshine of the September morning lit the room and turned her face to silver—this it is that, after so many years, clings to the memory as though of yesterday.
And then, without a sign or movement to prepare me, I saw that the eyes had opened and were fixed upon my face.
The whispered words came instantly:
“Where is he? Has he gone away?”
Stupid with distress and pain, my heart was choked. I stared blankly in return, the channels of speech too blocked to find a single syllable.
I raised my hands, though hardly knowing what I meant to do. She sat up in the chair and looked a moment swiftly about the room. Her lips parted for another question, but it did not come. I think in my face, or in my gesture perhaps, she read the message of despair. She hid her face behind her hands, leaned back with a dreadful drooping of the entire frame, and let a sigh escape her that held the substance of all unutterable words of grief.
I yearned to help, but it was my silence, of course, that brought the truth so swiftly home to her returning consciousness. The awakening was complete and rapid, not as out of common sleep. I longed to touch and comfort her, yet my muscles refused to yield in any action I could manage, and my tongue clung dry against the roof of my mouth.
Then, presently, between her fingers came the words below a whisper:
“I knew that this would happen ... I knew that once I slept, he’d go from me ... and I should lose him. I tried ... that hard ... to keep awake.... But sleep would take me. An’ now ... it’s took him ... too. He’s gone for—for very long ... again!” She did not say “for ever.”