For those who do not sleep, life has two sides—the side of night as well as day—and the heaviest hour of the day or night is the hour before the dawn, when the night-lamp totters and dies, and the ashen light of another day falls like despair on the familiar articles of furniture, the chairs, the table, the wardrobe, which have been up all night like ourselves, taking the imprint of our exhaustion through the interminable hours, and which look older and more haggard than ever in the changed light which brings nor change nor rest.
Those who sleep at night, for whom each day is not divided by a gulf of pain, who look upon the darkness as a time of rest, and the morning as a time of waking, know one side of life, perhaps, as the passers-by in the street know one side of the hospital as they skirt it—the outside wall.
Mr. Loftus slept ill, and the night after Sibyl's return he woke early. The gray light was just showing above the white blinds as he had seen it so many, many times. Would the morning ever come, he wondered, when he should no longer open his eyes upon the dawn, when 'these last steps' should be climbed, and effort would cease, and weariness might lie down and cease also?
The premonitory tremor, the shudder of coming illness, laid its hand upon him, and with it came that physical recoil of the flesh from solitude before which the strongest will goes down.
Involuntarily he got up and went to Sibyl's room. He opened the door noiselessly and looked in.
The room felt deserted. He went up to the bed; it was empty. A great fear fell upon him. Had she left him? Poor, poor child! had she left him, as that other wife had left him in the half-forgotten past, buried beneath so many years? Can any man whose wife has forsaken him ever quite forget that he has once been deserted, that the road which leads away from him has known a woman's footsteps, and another may walk in it? He stood still and listened. The spirit had over-mastered the flesh. All suffering had vanished.
From the next room, Sibyl's sitting-room, which opened out of her bedroom, a faint sound came. He noiselessly crossed, and looked through the half-open door, and thanked God.
Sibyl was lying on her face on the polished floor in her night-gown, moaning and sobbing, a white blot upon the dark boards.
He had seen her lie like that once before, among the bracken in the park, in the entire abandonment of young despair. The vague suspicion of many weeks dropped its disguise, and stood revealed, an awful figure between them, between the old man in his gray hair and the young, young wife.