Then gradually, as the long June days went by, life appeared feebly to renew itself and move within her.  At first it was only a look, raised to Adams, when he bent over her, with something of the pathetic, expectant wonder of a sick child; then a helpless expressive gesture, and at last he found in her eye a clearer and fuller recognition of her surroundings and of himself.  The gratitude he had seen on that terrible night surprised him again one day as he spoke to her; and after this he began to watch for its reappearance with an eagerness which he himself found it difficult to understand.  Of all virtues gratitude was most lacking in the woman who had been his wife; and this slow, silent growth of it, showed to him as no less a miracle than the coming of the spring or the resurrection of the dead earth beneath the rain.  There were moments even, when he felt that he must move softly, lest he disturb the working of those spiritual forces which make for righteousness by strange and wonderful ways.  Strange and wonderful, indeed, he had found, beyond all miracles were the means by which the soul might be brought back to the knowledge of its immortal destiny.  Was it not under the eyes of a harlot that he, himself, had seen the mystery which is God’s goodness? and so might he not find that Connie had learned, in the depths of her self-abasement, that the light which surrounds the pleasures of the senses is full of enchantment only for the distant, deluded vision?

But there were other hours when he asked himself if he were strong enough for the thing which he had before him—­strong enough, not for the swift, exalted moment of the sacrifice, but for the daily fret and torment of a perfectly unpoetic self-denial.  Would the light go out again and the exaltation fail him before many days?  Then he remembered the pathos of her struggling smile, the timid groping of her hands, the deprecating gratitude he found in her look; and it seemed to him when all other resources were exhausted—­when his energy, his duty, his religion flagged—­that his compassion would still remain in his heart to render possible all that was impossible to his will alone.  Compassion! this, he came to find in the end, was the true and the necessary key to any serious understanding of life.

He was still putting these questions to himself, when, coming in one afternoon from his office, he found Connie, wearing a loose fitting wrapper of some pale coloured muslin, awaiting him in an easy chair beside her window.  It was the first time that she had left her bed; and when he offered a few cheerful congratulations upon her recovered strength, she looked up at him with a face which still showed signs of the hideous ravages of the last few months.  In her hollowed cheeks, in her quivering unsteady lips, and in the dull grayness of her hair, from which the golden dye had faded, he could find now no faint traces of that delicate beauty he had loved.  At less than thirty years she looked the embodiment of uncontrolled and reckless middle-age.