"We must not think of his dying," he said. "We must only think that he
is going to live, and to come back to us, Natalie dear."
She flung off the arm he put around her.
"And that," he went on, feeling for words out of the dreadful confusion
in his mind, "if--the worst comes, that he has done a magnificent thing.
There is no greater thing, Natalie."
"That won't bring him back to us," she said, still in that frozen voice.
And suddenly she burst into hard, terrible crying.
All that night he sat outside her door, for she would not allow him to
come in. He had had Washington on the telephone, but when at last he
got the connection it was to learn that no further details were known.
Toward dawn there came the official telegram from the War Department,
but it told nothing more.
Natalie was hysterical. He had sent for a doctor, and with Madeleine
in attendance the medical man had worked over her for hours. Going out,
toward morning, he had found Clayton in the hall and had looked at him
sharply.
"Better go to bed, Mr. Spencer," he advised. "It may not be as bad as
you think. And they're doing fine surgery over there."
And, as Clayton shook his head: "Mrs. Spencer will come round all right. She's hysterical, naturally.
She'll be sending for you before long."
With the dawn, Clayton's thoughts cleared. If he and Natalie were ever
to get together at all, it should be now, with this common grief between
them. Perhaps, after all, it was not too late to re-build his house
of life. He had failed. Perhaps they had both failed, but the real
responsibility was his. Inside the room he could hear her moaning, a
low, monotonous, heart-breaking moan. He was terribly sorry for her. She
had no exaltation to help her, no strength of soul, no strength of any
sort. And, as men will under stress, he tried to make a bargain with his
God.
"Let him live," he prayed. "Bring him back to us, and I will try again.
I'll do better. I've been a rotten failure, as far as she is concerned.
But I'll try."
He felt somewhat better after that, altho he felt a certain ignominy,
too, that always, until such a time, he had gone on his own, as it were,
and that now, when he no longer sufficed for himself, he should beseech
the Almighty.
Natalie had had a sleeping-powder, and at last he heard her moaning
cease and the stealthy movements of her maid as she lowered the window
shades. It was dawn.