In the morning
he did not wake.
"He gave his life that I might have mine!" she lamented in the first
wild grief.
"No, don't say that, Nannie," her husband protested, calling her by the
pet name which her father always used. "He is dead; but if we owe each
other to his loss, it is because he was given, not because he gave
himself."
"Oh, I know, I know!" she wailed. "But he would gladly have given
himself for me."
That, perhaps, Lanfear could not have denied, and he had no wish to do
so. He had a prescience of happiness for her which the future did not
belie; and he divined that a woman must not be forbidden the extremes
within which she means to rest her soul.
II
THE EIDOLONS OF BROOKS ALFORD
I should like to give the story of Alford's experiences just as Wanhope
told it, sitting with us before the glowing hearth in the Turkish room,
one night after the other diners at our club had gone away to digest
their dinners at the theatre, or in their bachelor apartments up-town,
or on the late trains which they were taking north, south, and west; or
had hurried back to their offices to spend the time stolen from rest in
overwork for which their famished nerves would duly revenge themselves.
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