"Yes, I believe you," she said with a far-away look in her eyes. "I know that I can trust you now implicitly, and what I can't understand is that—feeling this so clearly—still I have no interest in life. Something has snapped inside of me. Life doesn't seem worth the struggle any longer——"
"But it is, dear! Life is always good, always beautiful, and always worth the struggle. We've but to lift our eyes and see. Sin is only our stumbling in the dark as we grope toward the light. I'm going to be a humbler and better man. I am no longer proud and vain. I've a larger and sweeter vision. I feel my kinship to the weak and the erring. Alone in the night my soul has entered into the fellowship of the great Brotherhood through the gates of suffering. You must know this, Jean—you know that it's true as I thus lay my heart's last secret bare to you to-day.
"Yes, Dan," she sighed wearily, "but I'm just tired. I don't seem to recognize anything I used to know. I look at the baby and he don't seem to be mine. I look at you and feel that you're a stranger. I look at my room, the lawn, the street, the garden—no matter where, and I'm dazed. I feel that I've lost my way. I don't know how to live any more."
For an hour he held her hand and pleaded with all the eloquence of his love that she would let him teach her again, and all she could do was to come back forever in the narrow circle her mind had beaten. She was tired and life no longer seemed worth while!
He kissed the drooping eyelids at last and laughed a willful, daring laugh as he gathered her in his arms and walked slowly back into the house.
"You've got to live, my own! I'll show you how! I'll breathe my fierce desire into your soul and call you back even from the dead!"
Yet in spite of all she drooped and weakened daily, and at the end of a fortnight began to complain of a feeling of uneasiness in her throat.
The old doctor said nothing when she made this announcement. He drew his beetling eyebrows low and walked out on the lawn.
Pale and haggard, Norton followed him.
"Well, doctor?" he asked queerly.