Both lay awake and both pretended to be asleep. In the two small heads lying as motionless on the pillows as melons their brains were busy as ant-hills after a storm. Eventually both fell into that mysterious state called sleep, yet neither brain ceased its civil war.
Bret was wakened from a bitter dream of a broken home by Sheila’s stifled cry. He spoke to her and she mumbled in her nightmare. He listened keenly and made out the words:
“Bret, Bret, don’t leave me. I’ll die if I don’t act. I love you, I love my children. I’ll take them with me. I’ll come home to you. Don’t hate me. I love you.”
Her voice sank into incoherence and then into silence, but he could tell by the twitching of her body and the clutching of her fingers that she was still battling against his prejudice.
He wrapped her in his arms and she woke a little, but only enough to murmur a word of love; then she sank back into sleep like a drowning woman who has slipped from her rescuer’s grasp.
He fell asleep again, too, but the daybreak wakened him. He opened his eyes and saw Sheila standing at the window and gazing at her beloved city, her Canaan which she could see but not possess.
She shook her head despairingly and it reminded him of the old gardener’s farewell to the birch-tree that must die.
She looked so eery there in the mystic dawn; her gown was so fleecy and her body so frail that she seemed almost translucent, already more spirit than flesh. She seemed like the ghost, the soul of herself departed from the flesh and about to take flight.
Bret thought of her as dead. It came to him suddenly with terrifying clarity that she was very near to death; that she could not live long in the prison of his love.
He was the typical American husband who hates tyranny so much that he would rather yield to his wife’s tyranny than subject her to his own. He took no pride in the thought of sacrificing any one on the altar of his self, and least of all did he want Sheila’s bleeding heart laid out there.