He believed presently that he was going to die, and he tried to recollect a magic formula which had once comforted him, but which he could no longer remember. Miss Knowlton saw his knitted brows.
"Is there anything you want?"
"Do you know anything which begins 'I believe'?" No sooner were the words uttered than he realized that he had delivered himself to the tyranny of a sentimental piety.
Miss Knowlton, being a church woman, knew the Creed perfectly. Having concluded a glib recitation she began a psalm. Her mouth was once more awry, she believed that she had lived through a second great moment.
It was not until the fifth day that he thought of Ellen. At once a reviving flood filled his veins; he became impatient with his helplessness, with bandages, with feeding with a spoon, with the tender ministrations of over-solicitous nurses. He moved restlessly in his narrow bed. Ellen would be coming home—if she did not stay for the Senior festivities, she might be on her way now! But Fetzer was not at home and he was not there! He tried to reckon the time which had passed since he had written to her, but the problem was too difficult. When he saw her, everything would be right, everything; she would smile at him, she—
"Oh," he cried suddenly, "I am helpless, useless, weak, crippled!"
It was midnight and no one but Stephen himself was present at this first moment of full mental and physical consciousness. The various shocks through which Miss Knowlton had sustained him were slight compared with the cruel realization that life was over and done for, that even Hilda's death could not give him Ellen, that she was lost to him. He measured for the first time his love. Without his hope of Ellen he had nothing. He felt himself sinking deep into an abyss; he knew that body as well as soul was faint, he believed that death might be at hand.
Then suddenly an extraordinary experience was his; he seemed to grasp for an instant that solution of life for which he had struggled a week ago in fever and pain. He lay thinking intently in the quiet night. The door was closed, traffic on the street was for a short time suspended, the nurse did not return. His father had had all Stephen's youth in which to sow; now suddenly, warmed not by sunshine, but by the heat of pain, and watered by affliction, the seed bore fruit. Forlorn, maimed, broken in spirit, he remembered his father's teaching, he heard his father's voice describing again the wooing of that importunate Lover in whom he believed:
"Yet let him keep the rest,
But keep them with repining restlessness;
Let him be rich and weary, that at least,
If goodness lead him not, yet weariness
May toss him to My breast."