She rose and lifted her arms to him and laid her hand on his shoulders. He had to stoop to let her do it. So held, he couldn't hope to escape from her candid, searching eyes.
"You aren't afraid of me now? I haven't made it go? You haven't lost it through me?"
"You've made it stay."
"Have I? Have I done that for you?"
He drew in his breath with a sob of passion. "Ah—the things you do!"
"None of them matter except that," she said.
She left him with that, turning on the threshold to add, "Why bother, then, about the other stupid things?"
It was as if she had said to him that since he owed that to her, a debt so unique, so enormous that he could never dream of paying it back in one lifetime, wasn't it rather absurd and rather mean of him to make a fuss about the rest? How could he think of anything but that? Didn't the one stupendous obligation cover everything, and lay him, everlastingly abject, at her feet? The only graceful act left him was to kneel down and kiss her feet. And that was what, in spirit, he was always doing. As for her, she would consider herself paid if she saw the difference and knew that she had made it.
It was only now, in the hour of achievement, that, looking back and counting all his flashes and his failures, he realized the difference she had made. It had seemed to him once that he held his gift, his vision, on a fragile and uncertain tenure, that it could not be carried through the tumult and shock of the world without great danger and difficulty. The thing, as he had said, was tricky; it came and went; and the fear of losing it was the most overpowering of all fears.
He now perceived that, from the beginning, the thing that had been most hostile, most dangerous to his vision was this fear. Time after time it had escaped him when he had hung on to it too hard, and time after time it had returned when he had let it go, to follow the thundering batteries of the world. He had not really lost it when he had left off clutching at it or had flung himself with it into the heart of the danger. He could not say that he had seen it in the reeking wards, and fields bloody with battle, or when his hands were at their swift and delicate work on the bodies of the wounded. But it had the trick of coming back to him in moments when he least looked for it. He saw now that its brief vanishings had been followed by brief and faint appearances, and that when it had left him longest it had returned to stay. The times of utter destitution were succeeded by perfect and continuous possession. He saw that nothing had been fatal to it except his fear.