“Then they really are doing it!” she cried. “They are up there operating on my child! I knew it when Doctor Beaman drove up, and Doctor Wynn came and asked Lionel to play over here.”
Galt made no denial. He stood beside her, swept out of himself by the sheer power of her astounding beauty, as he now beheld it for the first time since their parting. In his wildest stretch of fancy as to what the years might have brought her, he had not dreamed that she had become such a flower among women. There was a seductive maturity of intellect in her faultless face. The strange, appealing, and yet unreadable lights of genius were burning in her dark, mystic eyes. He stood before her with the smitten humility, the cringing shame, of a subject rebuked by his queen.
“Yes, I am sure of it!” she moaned, and she lowered her glorious head to the newel of the stairs and shuddered. “They are cutting my darling, and I can't go to him. Doctor Wynn thought he'd spare my feelings—as if that counted.”
She suddenly looked him squarely in the face, and he shrank before the calm penetration of her stare. “We'll never see him alive again,” she said, in a low, husky voice—“never again on earth!”
“Oh no, don't say that!” he cried, finding his submerged voice in the agony produced by her suggestion. “God wouldn't be so unmerciful—the child has harmed no one!”
“You speak of God,” she suddenly retorted, standing farther from him and drawing herself erect. “The word was a joke with you once,” she added, with a bitter sneer. “And I believed your puny theories, and blindly followed out the deductions you made with your nose in the earth during our vain dream of intellectual supremacy. But a change was wrought in me. Into my wretched darkness Lionel came, and I saw and was convinced. He was my living, pulsating, immortal link to the Infinite. But he is not for the earth. He is above it. God allowed Christ to suffer the pangs of a material existence for the salvation of the world, but He is too merciful to let my sensitive darling face what he would have to face. Lionel was sent to lift me, with his tiny hands, from the slough into which I had fallen, but his mission is over—oh, God, it is over! How can I bear it—how can I live without him? He is my life, my soul!” She covered her tortured face with her bloodless hands and remained still, save for the emotion which quivered through her hysterical frame.
Galt stood gazing at her for a moment, an almost uncontrollable yearning on him to clasp her in his arms and beg her forgiveness. He might have done so but for the fear of offending her. He glanced up the stairs. How still it was above! How like death! In his alarmed fancy he saw the two doctors standing aghast over the still, senseless form of his child. They had miscalculated! The physical examination had misled them; ether should have been the drug employed rather than chloroform!
Uncovering her face, Dora read his thoughts. She uttered a low, despairing wail, and they stood looking into each other's eyes. There was a sound of sudden movement on the floor above. Some one was raising a window-sash at the top of the stairs.
“I am sweating like an ox!” they heard Dearing say; and—could they believe their ears?—he was actually laughing, and calling out to Lionel: “I told you you'd not know when it was done. Now, lie down and go to sleep. You are as sound as a silver dollar. It may sting just a little tiny bit when you swallow, but that will be gone by to-morrow. Go to sleep, and when you wake I'll have that tricycle ready.”
“Thank God—thank God,” Dora exclaimed, “he is saved!”