"It's been an absolute reign of terror. Every nerve in my body is jumping and quivering.... I think I'm going mad."
"Listen." The man spoke as one might to a child who has awakened, terrified, out of a nightmare and is afraid to be alone. "I'm coming out there. You need to talk to some one. I'll leave the car out of hearing in the road."
"No, no!" she exclaimed in a wildly fluttering timbre of protest. "If he woke up it would be worse than this afternoon—it might kill him!"
But Stuart answered her with a quiet note of finality. "Wrap up well—it's cool outside—and meet me on the verandah. We can talk more safely that way than by 'phone. I'm going to obey the doctor implicitly—unless you fail to meet me. If you do that—" he paused a moment before hanging up the receiver—"I'll knock on the door."
The moon had not yet set as he started on foot up the driveway of the manse and the bare trees stood out stark and inky against the silver mists. Before he was more than half-way to the house he saw her coming to meet him, casting backward glances of anxiety over her shoulder.
She was running with a ghostlike litheness through the moonlight, her eyes wide and frightened and her whole seeming one of unreasoning panic so that the man, who knew her dauntlessness of spirit, felt his heart sink.
"You shouldn't have done it," she began in a reproachful whisper. "You shouldn't have come!" But he only caught her in his arms and held her so close to his own heart that the wild palpitation of her bosom was calmed against its steadiness. Her arms went gropingly round his neck and clutched him as if he were the one stable thing that stood against an allied ferocity of wind and wave.
"You needed me," he said. "And when you need me I come—even if I have to come like a burglar."
The eyes which she raised to his face were tearless—but hardly sane. She was fear-ridden by ghosts that struck at her normality and she whispered, "Suppose he died by my fault?"
At all costs, the lover resolved, Conscience must leave this place for a time—until she could return with a stabler judgment. But just now he could not argue with her.