Page:The Yellow Book - 04.djvu/86

76 can do nothing." He shook his head again, impatiently. She yawned, closed the door, and, with a little sigh of weariness, retraced her steps to the hearth. Farrell rose and followed her.

"Come," he said, bending over her, "you are very tired. Go and rest in the next room. There is nothing to be done. I will call you. Let me watch. I wish it." She looked at him in doubt. "Yes, yes," he pleaded. "Don't you see? I must be here, and you want sleep."

She glanced round the room, as if to assure herself that there was nothing to require her.

"Very well," she assented; "but call me soon." And she vanished through the doorway like a wraith.

Farrell took his seat and regarded his wife. The breathing came gently; masses of dark hair swarmed over the head that crouched low upon the pillow; one arm, crossing the face with shadow, lay reaching toward the brow. The room glowed with a luminous gloom rather than with light. The figure rested upon its side, and the soft rise of the hip stood out from the hollows of the coverlet. In the grate the ashes stirred and clinked; the street mumbled without; but within that chamber the stillness hung heavily. Farrell seemed to hear it deepen, and the quiet air spoke louder to him, as though charged with some secret and mysterious mission. He followed the hush with a mind half-vacant and wholly irrelevant. But presently the faintest rustle came with a roar upon his senses, and he sprang to his feet, stricken with sudden terror. The body moved slightly under its wrappings; the arm dropped slowly down the pillow into the darker hollows of the counter pane; the hair fell away; and the face, relapsing, softly edged into the twilight.

Farrell stood staring, mute and distracted, upon this piteous piece of poor humanity. Its contrast with the woman he had known