For the face that lay there was his wife's! Yes, hers! But the beautiful hair that she had gloried in--the hair that in his youth he had thought had once fallen like a benediction on his shoulder--was streaked with gray along the blue-veined hollows of the temples; the orbits of those clear eyes, beneath their delicately arched brows, were ringed with days of suffering; only the clear-cut profile, even to the delicate imperiousness of lips and nostril, was still there in all its beauty.

The coverlet had slipped from her shoulder; its familiar cold contour startled him.

He remembered how, in their early married days, he had felt the sanctity of that Diana-like revelation, and the still nymph-like austerity which clung to this strange, childless woman.

He even fancied that he breathed again the subtle characteristic perfume of the laces, embroideries, and delicate enwrappings in her chamber at Robles.

Perhaps it was the intensity of his gaze--perhaps it was the magnetism of his presence--but her lips parted with a half sigh, half moan.