"Jean Avery!" cried the physician, in a ringing tone.
Afterwards Avery thought of that other Healer who summoned his dearest friend from the retreat of death "in a loud voice." But at the moment he thought not at all. For Jean sighed gently and turned her face, and her husband's eyes were the first she saw when the light of her own high soul returned to hers.
In the dim of the dawn Avery followed the exhausted physician into the hall, and led him to an empty room.
"Rest, if you can, doctor," he pleaded; "we can call you. If she sleep, she shall do well," he added in a broken voice. The miracle was yet in his mind.
"Unless you see some change, she may sleep one hour. Call me by then," said Dr. Thorne abstractedly. "And telephone my wife and the hospital that I spend the morning here." He turned his face to the window. Avery, glancing at it in the gray light, saw that great tears were falling unashamed down the doctor's cheeks.
"These sudden deaths are so horrible!" he muttered. "They are the felonies of Nature." Long after this, when the eminent physician met the fate which has been elsewhere recorded of him, and which those who have read his memoirs may recall, Marshall Avery remembered these words; and the expression of the man's face as he uttered them.
He went back to his wife's room, and lay down on the bed by her side. She slept like some sweet child who was tired out with a nervous strain, and would wake, by the sanctities of Nature, refreshed for vigorous life. He dared not fall asleep himself for a careless moment, but propped himself on one elbow and watched her hungrily. Her pulse beat weakly yet, but with some steadiness, and rose in volume as the day deepened. In fact, the tide was coming to the flood.
Off there on the Shoals, reaching up around the gray Cape, inch upon patient inch, the waves climbed to their appointed places. With them the vitality of the woman, obeying the most mysterious law in Nature's mighty code, advanced, and held its own.
Avery looked at his wife, sleeping, as she, waking, would never see him look. All that was noble in shame, all that was permanent in love, harmonized in his eyes. Between his rapture and his reverence, resolve itself seemed to escape him, like a spirit winged for flight because no longer needed in a human heart, being invisibly displaced by stronger angels whose names are known only to the love of married man and woman when ultimate fate has challenged it and found defeat.
Avery's lips moved. He spoke inaudible things. "All I ask," he said, "is another chance." He was not what is called a praying man. But when he had said this, he added the words—"Thou God!"