He seemed to be passing through the universe of ideas like a comet--erratic, inapprehensible, untraceable.
Grace's distraction was almost as great as his.

In a few moments she firmly believed he was dying.

Unable to withstand her impulse, she knelt down beside him, kissed his hands and his face and his hair, exclaiming, in a low voice, "How could I?
How could I ?" Her timid morality had, indeed, underrated his chivalry till now, though she knew him so well.

The purity of his nature, his freedom from the grosser passions, his scrupulous delicacy, had never been fully understood by Grace till this strange self-sacrifice in lonely juxtaposition to her own person was revealed.

The perception of it added something that was little short of reverence to the deep affection for him of a woman who, herself, had more of Artemis than of Aphrodite in her constitution.
All that a tender nurse could do, Grace did; and the power to express her solicitude in action, unconscious though the sufferer was, brought her mournful satisfaction.