The sunken eyes opened. As a burst of sunlight through the suddenly opened doors of a sepulchre, the death-gray face was illumed. In those eyes, clear and burning, the nurse saw all that remained of a powerful personality. In their shadowy depths, she saw the last glowing embers of the vital fire gathered; carefully nursed and tended; kept alive by a will that was clinging, with almost superhuman tenacity, to a definite purpose. Dying, this woman _would_ not die--_could_ not die--until the end for which she willed to live should be accomplished. In the very grasp of Death, she was forcing Death to stay his hand--without life, she was holding Death at bay.
It was magnificent, and the gentle face under the nurse's cap shone with appreciation and admiration as she smiled her sympathy and understanding.
"My son--my son--will come--to-day." The voice was stronger, and, with the eyes, expressed a conviction--a certainty--with the faintest shadow of a question.
The nurse looked at her watch. "The boat was due in New York, early this morning, madam."
A step sounded in the hall outside. The nurse started, and turned quickly toward the door. But the woman said, "The doctor." And, again, the fire that burned in those sunken eyes was hidden wearily under their dark lids.
The white-haired physician and the nurse, at the farther end of the room, spoke together in low tones. Said the physician,--incredulous,--"You say there is no change?"
"None that I can detect," breathed the nurse. "It is wonderful!"
The doctor took the nurse's chart. For a moment, he studied it in silence. He gave it back with a gesture of amazement. "God! nurse," he whispered, "she should be in her grave by now! It's a miracle! But she has always been like that--" he continued, half to himself, looking with troubled admiration toward the bed at the other end of the room--"always."
He went slowly forward to the chair that the nurse placed for him. Seating himself quietly beside his patient, and bending forward with intense interest, his fine old head bowed, he regarded with more than professional care the wasted face upon the pillow.
The doctor remembered, too well, when those finely moulded features--now, so worn by sorrow, so marked by sickness, so ghastly in the hue of death--were rounded with young-woman health and tinted with rare loveliness. He recalled that day when he saw her a bride. He remembered the sweet, proud dignity of her young wifehood. He saw her, again, when her face shone with the glad triumph and the holy joy of motherhood.