The Choir Invisible

More days passed, and still she did not return. His eagerness for her rose

and followed, and sorrowfully set with every sun.

Meantime he read the book, beginning it with an effort through finding it

hard to withdraw his mind from his present. But soon he was clutching it

with a forgotten hand and lay on his bed for hours joined fast to it with

unreleasing eyes; draining its last words into his heart, with a thirst

newly begotten and growing always the more quenchless as it was always being

quenched. So that having finished it, he read it again, now seeing the high

end of it all from the low beginning. And then a third time, more

clingingly, more yearningly yet, thrice lighting the fire in his blood with

the same straw. Like a vital fire it was left in him at last, a red and

white of flame; the two flames forever hostile, and seeking each to burn the

other out. And while it stayed in him thus as a fire, it had also filled all

tissues of his being as water fills a sponge--not dead water a dead

sponge--but as a living sap runs through the living sponges of a young oak

on the edge of its summer. So that never should he be able to forget it;

never henceforth be the same in knowledge or heart or conscience; and

nevermore was the lone spiritual battle of his life, if haply waged at all,

to be fought out by him with the earlier, simpler weapons of his innocence

and his youth, but with all the might of a tempted man's high faith in the

beauty and the right and the divine supremacy of goodness.

One morning his wounds had begun to require attention. No one had yet come

to him: it was hardly the customary hour: and moreover, by rising in bed he

could see that something unusual had drawn the people into the streets. The

news of a massacre on the western frontier, perhaps; the arrival of the

post-rider with angry despatches from the East; or the torch of revolution

thrown far northward from New Orleans. His face had flushed with feverish

waiting and he lay with his eyes turned restlessly toward the door.

It was Mrs. Falconer who stepped forward to it with hesitation. But as soon

as she caught sight of him, she hurried to the bed.

"What is the trouble? Have you been worse?"

"Oh, nothing! It is nothing."

"Why do you say that--to me?"

"My shoulder. But it is hardly time for them to come yet."

She hesitated and her face showed how serious her struggle was.

"Let me," she said firmly.