"Thank you, Jack," he said, his face brightening for the first time. "Of course you will stay with her."
"The crisis will come with her awakening," said the doctor. "She will awaken sound of mind and at death's door, or she will awaken to live, her mind gone. It is all in her sleeping, and to-night will decide it. I will retire, waken me if I am needed."
All night Colonel Goff and I sat up. Every little while we went into her room to see Elsie sleeping, Marget by her side, the nurse asleep on the cot.
Twice the doctor came in. "Her pulse and temperature are normal," he would say. "That's good. Let her sleep."
But Colonel Goff and I could not sleep. All night he smoked, talked and walked the floor. He told me his life's story, and in the hopefulness of Elsie's sleeping he seemed to have taken a new hold of things. "If the hand that has flung the loaded dice for me all my life will only give me one clean deal now," he cried, as he paced the floor with his steady military stride.
"It will," I said, "Colonel Goff. It gives a clean deal to a clean heart always, and yours is a different heart now. I see it; you are a different man now. Now, I would give my very life for you and my poor little Elsie."
There was deep emotion in the man before me, his eyes were moist. "Great God, Jack, do you mean that, man? Do you know you have said it? It is even so—I see it—have seen it all night—wondering, how—
"God help me," he went on, "and save Elsie as He has saved me—from myself—through it all. I see it now—through all my life—my own fool will, my obstinacy, madness, sin—unseeingness: brought me through it all, back to my own, my family name, my earldom—my own—Great God, think of it—what has been done to unseeing, uncaring me! How much I have received—how little I have earned!"
I left him a strong man pacing the floor, his face aglow with a new life.
Elsie had slept twelve hours.