"Yes, it was bad," repeated Adams quietly; and then rising to his feet he staggered like a drunken man into his bedroom across the hall. Still wearing his evening clothes he flung himself heavily upon the sofa and fell at once into the profound sleep of acute bodily exhaustion. Two hours later when he awoke to take the coffee which the kindly nurse brought to him, he found that his slumber, instead of refreshing him, had left him sunk in a sluggish melancholy with a clogged and inactive brain.
"She is very quiet now," said the woman, a tall, strong person of middle age, "and strangely enough the spell has hardly weakened her at all—she has had her breakfast and speaks of going out for a little shopping after luncheon."
"Well, that's good news!" exclaimed Adams heartily, as he hastily swallowed his black coffee. Then, holding out his cup to be refilled, he shook his head with the winning humorous smile which was his solitary beauty. "This coffee will have to write two pages in my magazine," he said, "so pour abundantly, if you please."
Sitting there in his dishevelled evening clothes, with his thin, sallow face under his rumpled hair, he made hardly an impressive figure even when viewed in the effulgent light of romance as a devoted husband. There was nothing of the heroic in his appearance; and yet as the nurse looked down upon him she felt something of the curious attraction he had for men like Arnold Kemper or Perry Bridewell—men whose innate principles of life differed so widely from his own. It was impossible to build a sentimental fiction about him, she thought—he had no place among the broad shouldered, athletic gentlemen who bewitched her in the pages of the modern novel—but she recognised, for the first time, as she stood gravely regarding him, that there could be a love founded upon other attributes than these. To be loved as he loved Connie seemed to her at the instant a very beautiful and perfect thing.
"I think you have suffered more from it than your wife has," she observed, as she replaced the cup upon the tray.
Adams broke into his whimsical laugh. "You don't judge fair," he retorted, "wait until I'm washed and in my right clothes again. If there's anything on earth that turns a man into a corpse, it is an evening suit by daylight."
Then, as she went out with the tray, he endeavoured, while he changed his clothes, to pull himself, by an effort of will, into proper shape to meet the day's work before him.
An hour afterward, as he walked through the morning sunlight to his office, he found that his unusual melancholy had vanished before the first breath of fresh air. A sense of detachment—of world-loneliness came over him as he looked at the passing crowd of strangers, but there was no sadness in the feeling, for he felt within himself the source as well as the renewal of his peace. He had never regarded himself as what is called a religious man—it was more than ten years since he had entered a church or heard a sermon—yet in this very relinquishment of self, was there not something of the vital principle, of the quickening germ of all great religions? Though he had never said in his thoughts "I believe this" or "I hold by this creed or that commandment," his nature was essentially one in which the intellect must be supreme either for good or for evil; and in his soul, which had been for so long the battlefield of a spiritual warfare, there had dawned at last that cloudless sunrise of faith in which all lesser creeds are swallowed up and lost. If he had ever attempted to put his religious belief into words, he would probably have said with his unfailing humour that it "sufficed to love his neighbour and to let his God alone."
Now, as he passed rapidly through the humming streets, his thoughts were so anxiously engrossed by Connie's condition that, when his name was uttered presently at his elbow, he started and looked up like one awakening uneasily from a dream. The next moment the air swam before him and he felt his blood rush in a torrent from his heart, for the voice was Laura's, and he discovered when he turned that she was looking up eagerly into his face.
"Nothing short of a meditation on the seven heavens can excuse such absorption of mind," she said.