CHAPTER THIRTY ONE.

The greatest situations in life are invariably incomplete, inexorably limited by the very stress of feeling that should make them effective and convincing, as, for instance, it does on the stage, where effect is duly studied and considered irrespective of the sensitiveness of the human mind that shrinks from making a display of its deeper emotions.

Because of the intensity of their feeling and the natural reserve that prompted them to its concealment, the meeting between husband and wife was commonplace in the extreme. For years they had been apart, nursing resentment one against the other. Each had failed the other in the great essentials of married life. Both had made mistakes, and both had been unrelenting. But death makes an extraordinary difference in human affairs, even when it is merely the overshadowing of death's wings, which, hovering for a while, pass on, the time being not yet fulfilled.

The fear, the almost certainty that death would claim her husband had melted for ever the hardness in Zoe Lawless' heart. She was prepared, had been prepared from the moment she determined to leave Cape Town in search of him, to forgive every injury that she had suffered at his hands,--to accept him as he was for her love's sake, unconditionally, as he had once told her was the only way possible to complete reconciliation. He had less to forgive; but he also had come to regard life differently since he had stood on the borderland of the Great Eternal,--to realise its limitations and insufficiencies, the pettiness of ill-feeling, the seriousness of the huge human blunder that is called unkindness. The overshadowing of death's wings had softened him, had given him pause to think.

When the door opened in response to his querulously uttered invitation, and Zoe entered with her flowers in her hand, he looked towards her with a quick, sharp glance of inquiry. Behind the look was a certain fierce shyness, a diffidence which he strove to conceal. She approached the bed, placed the bloemetjes on the coverlet close to his hand and sat down in the chair she had occupied on the only other occasion that she had been permitted inside the room.

"I am so glad you are better," she said.

He removed his gaze from her face and played with the flowers.

"You've been long enough in coming to see me," he returned ungraciously.

"The doctor was afraid I might excite you," she explained.

"Rot!" he ejaculated.

He pulled the flowers about and did not look at her.

"It's been a near thing with me," he went on, "I've had a closer look at death than I'm likely to get again, and come through... It didn't seem to matter, somehow." He still played with the flowers. "It would have squared things, perhaps, if I'd made you a widow."

She leant towards him, and spoke in a low voice, reproachfully.

"You know it wouldn't have squared things. It would have deprived both of us of the chance to make amends."

"Still making a matter of conscience of it?" he said cynically.

She put her hand quickly on his, and so stayed the restless fingers in their destructive task.

"Hugh! That isn't kind."

"No," he agreed. "But you see, it's easy for you to do the right thing under given circumstances."

"Oh! my dear!" she said. And then: "Easy! If you knew what it cost me to reconcile myself to the thought of sharing in nursing you with that woman... I was prepared to do that. Oh yes! I know the rights of that story now, but I didn't when I left Cape Town."

Lawless flushed darkly.

"I don't deserve that you should come near me, Zoe... I behaved to you like a cad."

"You didn't behave well," she returned. "I wonder why you acted as you