There were only thin wooden walls to the little forest bungalow.
Ferlie and he had been sleeping indoors since his illness so that she might have all medicines and the paraphernalia for nursing within easy reach.
Therefore, it happened that in turning his head restlessly to escape an intruding beam of moonlight through the curtainless door, he roused himself with sudden completeness, straining to catch the echoes of quiet sobbing.
He only paused an instant.
Ferlie was lying face downwards: her forehead on her arms, which gleamed lily-coloured in the pure light.
He knelt beside her, attempting to raise her head.
"My dear... My dear..."
She grasped thankfully at the steadying sensitive fingers. "Help me, Cyprian! You were always, really, the stronger. Help me to conquer it.... I know you have thought that everything mattered a great deal more to you than to me. That I was satisfied with the knowledge that the end is not yet. But sometimes—at night—Heaven is very far away and earth is most powerfully real, and doubts creep over me, who have laid the great burden of this faith on you, whether I am fit to bear the burden of my own human loving. You see, Cyprian, there is one instinct given to women at Creation; the roots of which are in Creation itself.
"John is mine by duty and Thu Daw is yours by desire, but I want—and, at the moment, I'd sell my soul to eternal death to make it come true—your son in my arms ... through love...."
So came again to Cyprian the inexorable phantom of that Master of whose subjection he had been made falsely confident by the soothing sympathy of a celibate's idealism and the magic of Ferlie's trust, a few short hours back.