Now, in the hour when his fortunes were again in the fatal balance, when he would be started again for a fair race with the wife from whom he had been so long parted, another face came between.
All at once the question Burlingame asked him, as to whether his wife was living, came to him.

He had never for an instant thought of her as dead, but now a sharp and terrifying anxiety came to him.

If his wife was living! Living?
Her death had never been even a remote possibility to his mind, though the parting had had the decisiveness of death.
Beneath all his shrewdness and ability he was at heart a dreamer, a romanticist to whom life was an adventure in a half-real world.
It was impossible to sleep.

He tossed from side to side.

Once he got up in the dark and drank great draughts of water; once again, as he thought of Mona, his wife, as she was in the first days of their married life, a sudden impulse seized him.