“Sweetheart, you can’t help her, and you are enduring every pang she suffers. Her pain is mostly physical now. Yours is both physical and mental. You must not squander your strength. We will need it for the harder part to come. Won’t you lie down and try to sleep?”
“Sleep! when the most terribly significant thing in the world is under way? How can we grow so callous? I never realized the marvel of life until now. I must go through every heart-throb of it. I need it! I will have more pity for your mother, more toleration for my own mother, more love for you, Lary—if there is any more.”
Larimore Trench closed his eyes, bitter self-abasement surging through his being. He had never been at grips with life. Nay, rather, he had turned from it in a superior attitude of disdain. He would not touch the woman he loved. She was too holy for his coward’s hands.
IV
As the grey dawn was breaking over the snow-whitened Hudson, the nurse aroused the two who dozed in their chairs in the living-room.
“You’d better come,” she said excitedly. “Mrs. Winthrop isn’t going to hold out.”
At the door the physician waved them back. Judith caught a glimpse of Eileen’s deathlike face and she ran sobbing down the hall. A long time she stood, her husband’s cherishing arms around her. Then a petulant wail from the room at the end of the long hall told them it was over.
At noon a letter to David was posted.
“You must be prepared for the worst. Early this morning a little girl came. It weighs less than four pounds. The doctor says, considering its premature condition, the extreme youth of the mother, and the circumstances of delivery, there is not one chance in ten that it will survive. We are more concerned for the mother. I will telegraph you, only in case of extremity.”