Rose Wilding did not rise from her bed the next day, nor, in the daytime, for many days. When she had come home in the evening she had looked, to the casual eye, as robust as ever. But in the morning it was plain that she had fallen into a complete mental and physical collapse.

It seemed that she must have gone on upon the sheer strength of terror and worry, until, once finding the little girl, as she thought, the stimulus was gone; and her strength and her interest in life had gone with it. She lay all day like one in a partial doze, evidently not asleep, but paying no attention to anybody or anything about her. Augusta she noticed not at all, except to take from her the food that she brought and to submit passively to her tidying and washing. Wardwell she recognized with a brief, passing glimmer of her old flashing smile, but not even he could arouse her more than momentarily. To her own doctor, whom Augusta had called in, she answered quietly, and without seeming to think that any other explanation was necessary, that she was resting and that she did not think that she would get up.

At night when the house had settled into its bedtime quiet, Augusta stole into the little cot at the foot of her mother's bed, and waited.

After a little she heard her mother stir softly in the bed, and then heard her get stealthily out to the floor. She came straight to the little cot, and, as she knelt by it, Augusta could feel her warm breath upon her own tumbled hair. Then, satisfied, she stole softly back into bed and went sound asleep. This was the first day of the new life for Augusta. And every day that followed through the fall and winter was exactly like it. It seemed that Rose Wilding lived through the day just waiting for the night to come, that she might steal from her bed to find her little girl. She never spoke to Augusta except to answer a direct question. She submitted in a gentle, kindly way to Augusta's every ministration. She smiled at Wardwell and always knew him. But when he would time and again, indicating Augusta, ask who this girl was, she always answered with a deprecating "Hush!" and a pitying glance at Augusta which said plainly that he should not ask, that he knew well enough where the girl had come from and he ought to know better than to hurt her feelings by bringing it up. He asked the question often in a good-hearted effort to make her realize that this was Augusta. But, one day, after he had asked it, he saw Augusta's face as she caught her mother's sidelong look. He did not ask the question again.

Gradually the three settled to an acceptance of the state of affairs as they existed in the mind of Rose Wilding. By day, Augusta was the girl that had followed Rose Wilding from "that place." At night, the little Augusta came from somewhere and slept in her place at the foot of her mother's bed.

The change that came over Rose Wilding was one that to the outer eye was wholly inexplicable. Though that there was a change was plain to the most casual look. Probably it was to the casual, unconcerned eye that the change was most startling.

One day, when Rose Wilding had been some weeks at home, a new boarder, a Mrs. Barron, a nervous, high-strung, over-worked woman, head of department in one of the great retail stores, came into the sitting room to speak to Augusta. She glanced accidentally into the bedroom and straight into the eyes of Rose Wilding whom she had never before seen.

Mrs. Barron fainted.

Augusta and Wardwell, accustomed to seeing Rose Wilding day by day, could not realize the extent of the change that had come over her. To them she was today practically as she had been yesterday. But to a stranger the picture of the large handsome woman, her face blanched now by hidden disease to a transparent pearl white, the skin smooth and unlined as a growing baby's, her pallor doubled by the white of the bed and the enamel that covered every object in the room, was in all a sight to arouse a nameless, creeping dread of something present but unseen.

Augusta had taken a few months of hospital training during the year past, and her care of her mother became not only a cult and a religion but almost a fanatical passion. She had turned the room into her ideal of a hospital room. She had painted and enamelled everything so that all could be scrubbed and washed down with disinfectants. She would have nothing in the room that was not a pure white. She dressed the bed and her mother in the snowiest things she could lay hand to.

The effect was not at all what she had had in mind. To herself, living as she did so close to her mother, the room was just the cheeriest and sweetest abode that could be made for a beloved sick one. But her mother's wondering, childlike eyes, as they looked out unseeing from under the circle of completely blanched hair above them upon the room that was now her world, did not have the look familiar to the sick room. They were eyes that looking, and seeing not, yet dealt with strange thing that showed through a curtain.

Augusta, from long watching, from unending longing and perpetual defeat, had worn thin the coarser material covering that held the living, burning spirit within her. As her mother seemed to remove day by day into deeper and deeper places of the soul's isolation, Augusta seemed ever to follow her.

Wardwell, standing by his wife with the feeling of a strange man watching over a girl baby left suddenly and unaccountably to his care and at the same time with the hunger of a young lover for his sweetheart's first kisses, thought, and thought often, that she was going away from him.

She was unfailingly dear and thoughtful. The moments which she could snatch for him from the ever increasing care of her mother she filled with anxious and touching tenderness. Every day brought him a new and revealing sense of the depth of her spirit and affection. But the feeling of being separated from her came pressing upon him with a twofold weight.

In the day time she played her part as the girl who had come from "that place" with Rose Wilding, while Wardwell looked on heart sick with sympathy for the pain that he knew she carried and with a withering sense of his own uselessness. She played a part. But she played the part so well in her self-effacing patience that he was finding it necessary to remind himself that she was playing a part. It came to the point where he at times caught himself walking rapidly up and down his room and arguing with himself whether this was really his Augusta, or whether he, too, was losing his grip on reality.

At night, when she was away from his sight and he knew that she had gone back into the little Augusta of Rose Wilding's memory, it was, if anything, worse. Here he knew she played a willing part, trying to make the part a reality. For Wardwell knew the daring of her mind and the greatness of her desire; knew that she would stop at nothing, would grasp at every thread of memory that could possibly draw her mother's mind across the vacant wilderness between the present and the past.

But even this double barrier of outward isolation from the Augusta who was his was not the great thing that he feared. The look which he had seen in Augusta's face in the days when they were hunting the city for her mother, that strained, listening look that took her away from him and from everything about them, was often in her eyes now. Somehow he knew that in it she spoke to the spirit of Rose Wilding that wandered in the unknown places.

He did not resent the state of things. But he found himself unaccountably peevish and unwontedly tempted to self pity.

He did not know what was coming upon him. Would not have believed it if he had been told. He knew that they were bad days for him. They were days in which he sat pounding out useless hours at the typewriter, only to destroy the work as soon as he had done it. They were nights when he worked feverishly, bitterly at the jokes and skits that were at once his bread and butter and the bane of his soul.

He came to hate the mere thought of writing at all. He was a failure. Even the things that he could do, the hated jokes that until now had brought him enough for a living, were now failing him. He was not making enough to afford to take Augusta and her mother away from this big house. And the thought that Augusta in the face of all her burdens was obliged to keep it to support her mother and herself, while he barely paid his board drove him frantic.

One day in the middle of the winter he climbed to the coop in the fourth story of the old building in Bleecker street where the presses were complaining over the last edition of the afternoon. He had been walking nearly all day, climbing stairs in increasing discouragement and going down them again with a certain sickly relief. He was, in short, looking for work.

Six months before he would have sworn that he would never again have to go back to the treadmill of routine work. He had been so sure that he could sit his whole life, if necessary, and turn out stories and scraps enough to give him the money he needed. He had deliberately planned for himself a life in which he would earn just enough to live in his own way, giving himself the time to think and work upon the books that he wanted to write.

His marriage had changed his plan of life. He did not propose that Augusta and her mother should be dependent upon the girl's work and the house. It did not occur to him that Augusta was not, and did not intend to be, dependent upon him for a living. There was, of course, a living in the house for herself and her mother, as there had always been. But that was not Wardwell's way of looking at the matter. Augusta was his wife. And it was his immediate business to begin earning enough money for all three of them.

At once he had begun to crowd himself. For a few weeks he had found himself earning more money than he had ever thought possible from his daily work. But it took him only a short time to flood the market of Sunday papers which he had built up for himself. He had not known how thin was the vein which he had been working. In a certain foolish contempt for the thing which he did easily he had thought that he could turn it out mechanically, without heart in it, and in any quantity. He was sharply undeceived.

The first few batches of stories that came back did no more than annoy him. But as the refusals became more and more perfunctory, and more carefully polite, Wardwell knew, with sickening insight, that his stories were not even being read by the editors who used to welcome them.

He knew that he had lost his power through despising it. He had writhed on in ugly despair, cursing the facility with which he could still write; for he knew that it was that very facility which was now his undoing. He had not hoped, but he had kept on trying. Now his money was gone and he must find something.

Jim Ray was sympathetic, and heartily sceptical.

"All rot!" he growled. "Stop bitting your finger ends and ease up a little. Your face looks like a rat's with the ferret about three jumps behind. Quit it. Borrow some money. Here, I'm as poor as my own devil but I can get you some. There's lots of the stuff around somewhere. Borrow a hundred and go up on a farm somewhere for a few weeks, and sleep."

"You're all wrong," said Wardwell, still breathing hard, "there's nothing the matter with me. It's the confounded stairs here. They're so steep they lean over backward."

"You need to go easy, I tell you, Jimmie. What you need is a rest."

"Rest! I haven't done a stroke for six weeks!"

"Probably not. But you've been bending over a typewriter till the back ribs are sticking into your lungs."

"What in blazes are you talking about?" said Wardwell bluffly. "If you want to stall me off, why don't you give me the usual thing—'office all full just now, leave your name and address, we'll call you up if we need, and so forth?' Was I so useless as that when I was here?"

"Jimmie," said Ray quietly, "there's plenty of work here for a man as good as you. But you're not able just now to do it, and it would kill you to try. Go home and go to bed, and let your wife take care of you." Wardwell stared at his friend, trying to outface him, to bluff the thing down by sheer stubbornness. But there was a sickening, cold weakness at the bottom of his stomach. He knew that Ray was seeing through him and finding him out as he had not been able to see himself.

With an odd feeling of curiosity and detachment he walked over to a little square of mirror that hung on a pillar at just the right height for Ray to comb his bald head by. Wardwell took it off the nail and shoved it up the post about a foot and a half.

He was curious to know what it was in him that Ray had seen. But there was nothing to be seen, except, perhaps, a sort of hunted look about the eyes and a kind of pinched drawing of the nostrils. He did not look at all like a sick man.

"You're all wrong," he repeated stubbornly. "And besides, my wife's got something else to do."

Ray only answered quietly:

"How much are you coughing, Jimmie?"

Wardwell looked around sharply, in a turn of sudden worry. But in a moment he laughed out:

"What the deuce are you doing? Second story work, along with your other little activities? Of course I—I cough a little. But that's just the smoking and the irritation. Confound you, you'd be coughing bricks if you'd been sitting at a machine for six weeks without being able to knock out a good line!"

"I suppose so. But, Jimmie, you'll have to give up this other idea. You don't look well. You'd never stand cold and wet and long waiting. You know the dog's life of a reporter. One good cold would do for you."

"But, I tell you—"

"Jimmie, be sensible for once. Go home and let that good little girl of yours get a good look at you. If she doesn't tell you to pack off out of the city for a while, I'll admit that I'm wrong." Wardwell stayed a while, arguing mulishly, but Jim Ray did not move from his position. He would not agree to help Jimmie to a job because the latter was not able to work.

At home, he found Augusta tearfully trying to coax and lift her mother back into bed. As he stood in the sitting room he could hear the girl pleading:

"Please, please, mamma dear, can't you help just one little step! I can't lift any more—Just one little step!"

Then he heard the sagging of the bed under the heavy body and he knew that Augusta had accomplished her task.

Now he remembered what Doctor Gardner had told him, that this phase of Mrs. Wilding's malady would come—not long before the end. She would rouse herself out of the torpor into which she had settled. Some vague, unformed fear would probably stir her, and she would have to be watched. If it was coming now Augusta must not be left to do this alone. He would have to find a good strong nurse. He must see Gardner about it right away. That he had no money did not occur to him now. In the face of Augusta's need he did not think of that fact.

Augusta came out suddenly and walked straight into Jimmie's arms where he stood in the middle of the room.

"Oh, Jimmie," she said, resting tiredly against him, "I needed you so! Where have you been?"

"Oh, just around."

"She had crawled under the bed, Jimmie," said Augusta choking, "just like some poor wild thing, and when she looked out at me, Oh! Why, why does she seem to fear me, to almost hate me sometimes?"

"No, dearest, no," said Jimmie, holding her quiet. "No, it isn't that at all. There's something we don't understand. She's in the dark and so are we. Her mind is struggling to break through, and we cannot help because we are in the dark too. Outwardly she doesn't know you. But she does know you, dear, she feels you, in another way. She knows that her little Augusta is around her, caring for her. The flesh and the senses are playing a cruel trick on her poor spirit, dear. But she does know that you are about her."

"Oh, Jimmie, do you really believe it? I'm so tired trying to believe!"

"Yes, dear, I'm as sure as that we are standing here that she does in some way—I don't know how—she does really feel you. But I'm afraid, dearest that there is a change coming now. You know Gardner told us to expect it. And it's going to be cruel hard upon you, dear. You must not try to do all alone. I'll see Gardner tonight and we'll get a good strong nurse."

At the word he felt Augusta stiffen resistingly in his arms and he knew that a struggle was coming.

"Oh, Jimmie, don't ask me to do that! I couldn't—I couldn't give up one little bit of her, not one little minute to anyone."

"But, dear, you are not able. You are too little for it."

"I can't help it, Jimmie. You know I can't. You know how I've waited, every hour of every day, waited and prayed, for a moment when my darling would know me—when she would know that I hadn't left her, that she hadn't been left to strange, careless people. And think, Jimmie, think what it would mean to me if the moment came, even one little flash, and I wasn't there for her to know me! Jimmie," she said quietly, turning slowly upon him with that strange, unseeing light in her eyes, "I think, if my moment should slip away from me that way—I think that I should die." And Wardwell, bewildered, silenced, half believing, knew that he was beaten.

But he did go to see the doctor.

Doctor Gardner's little eyes twinkled behind a cloud of smoke from a big cigar as Wardwell expounded the situation at home and told what must be done and what Augusta must not be allowed to do. When Jimmie had quite finished the doctor asked with an elaborate diffidence:

"Ah—Do I understand that you are intending to do something that Augusta does not want?"

"Well—of course—" Jimmie started to explain.

"I was only going to remark," the doctor went on serenely, "that, to my personal knowledge, Augusta began doing things after her own plan on the day she was born. And, so far as I know, nobody has been able to change that. You see, the trouble has been that she has always turned out to be right."

"Yes, of course she's always right," Wardwell hastened to agree, "but, in this—"

"And, unless you have found a way," the doctor proceeded, "of changing Augusta, we'll just have to let her go her own way in this. To be sure, though, we must try to see that she does not kill herself with the hard work.

"But how's the book coming on?" he asked suddenly, sitting up and fixing Wardwell with a sharp, steady appraisal that Jimmie could almost feel physically.

"Rotten!" said Jimmie, annoyed and sullen, though he did not know why. "But how did you know—?"

"Oh, Augusta was telling me something the other day, about your walking the floor, and—one thing and another. Come inside here a moment," the doctor commanded, rising brusquely and walking to the door of his inner office.

As Wardwell closed the double baize-lined, sound-proof doors of the little consulting room behind him he felt a sickening assurance that he was going to hear bad news. But he was mainly irritated and angry with himself because he now knew that he had been giving Augusta additional worry.

A half hour later he was listening restlessly to Doctor Gardner's explanations about 'filtration in the upper right lobe' and 'weakening of the walls' and gathering in a general way that he was well on the way to being a consumptive. He was telling himself quietly that he did not believe a word of it, that if he could just once strike his stride on a good little story he would be all right in a week.

Finally the doctor prescribed. "You will have to get out of the city at once. Just walk out, don't fuss about it, and go south somewhere, where you can stay out in the open and just lie around and eat and sleep. Don't take work with you, and don't let it follow you. Just walk out and drop everything but the business of saving your life. That's just what I mean, young man. I have not concealed anything from you. And—I'm not exaggerating anything. You must do this now, tomorrow."

Saying nothing, Wardwell rose to go. Inwardly he was grumbling to himself that it was always easy for the other fellow to tell you to drop everything and walk away. But he knew that he could not be churlish. The doctor was probably right and certainly he was honest and friendly. They shook hands in silence, and the doctor, used to seeing people take their news in all sorts of ways, let him go without another word.

Augusta had once said that Jimmie sometimes was not quite grown up. Outside in the street he proved it. He turned deliberately and looking up at Doctor Gardner's window, much after the manner of a boy sticking out his tongue in defiance, he said aloud: "You can go to the devil. I wouldn't leave Augusta now, not to save ten lives."

As an afterthought, before reaching home, he went into a drug store and called the doctor on the telephone. He warned him truculently:

"Tell her my nerves are bad, that's true enough. Tell her any tale you like. But don't tell her—what you've just told me. I won't have Augusta worried now."

He would not expect to hide it long from Augusta, if there was anything seriously wrong with him. She always knew the truth, somehow. But he did not believe literally what the doctor had told him, and he was confident that things could drift on as they were.

"In fact," he said to himself as he walked along in the face of the sharp night wind, "I feel better this minute than I have for a long time. That's just natural contrariness, I suppose."

Augusta was waiting for him, sitting wrapped in a heavy dressing robe reading under the lamp in her mother's sitting room. She was so like a tired little girl that as his glance momentarily followed the stream of the light into the mother's room and fell upon the little cot drawn up and ready at the side of the mother's bed, Wardwell for an instant lost his grip on reality. The fiction at which Rose Wilding's poor wandering mind had grasped seemed to be actually the truth. And Wardwell found that he had to struggle with himself before he could remember that Augusta was truly his wife and that she and he had an existence for each other which did not depend on that fiction. But when he looked again at Augusta and saw the woman in her, the steady, self-contained, gentle strength that shone in the beauty of her tired eyes, he knew that Augusta was really his. And now for the first time he weakened, his knees bent under him, he felt and was the sick man. He wanted to tell her, to confide, to lean upon her. Angrily he shook the feeling off and came quickly over to sit on the arm of her chair.

"You had him all fixed!" he began accusingly, thinking to head off with banter the question in her eyes. "The first thing he said was that you got up and rearranged the parlor furniture and fired the cook and fixed the furnace the very day you were born—well, I couldn't swear that he mentioned the furnace in so many words. But that was the general idea. You've always had your own way, and everybody else's way. And you always will. And he turned me out, laughing at me for thinking that I could change things."

"What else did he say, dear?" she asked with a quiet smile of full understanding. "About you?"

"Oh, it was just like the fellow that went to the doctor and said he was sick.

"'Stop smoking.'

"'But, doctor, I never smoked in my life.'

"'Oh, I see. Then that's just what you need. Start smoking. My usual fee is ten dollars—but—ah—considering—'"

"Jimmie!"

"Honest! Cross my heart! Hope to die of a broken leg! It was just like that.

"He told me that I had to take a rest. I told him I hadn't worked for weeks. Then he told me that whatever I was doing I should stop it."

"You are not telling me what he really said," Augusta commented.

"Oh, big words, all big long ones, that might have meant polygamy or liver trouble for all I knew. But the upshot of it was just what I knew before. I'm nervous and my temper is bad. And he must have known that I didn't have any money, for he really didn't ask me for any," he confessed gracelessly as an afterthought. "But it's just as I told him. If I could only rap out a decent few lines I'd be all—"

A sharp fit of coughing came up, choking him. He rose and hurried out into the hall. Augusta started to follow him, but a movement in the bedroom caught her ear and she turned back. She wanted to follow him, to make him tell her just what was the trouble. But the fear of what her mother might do was too strong upon her.

For the time, Wardwell had escaped. In his own room, he sat down at the desk, gasping between spells of coughing and trying to smother the noise with his handkerchief. The coughing stopped after a little, and he was surprised to feel a sensation of pleasant warm moisture in his irritated throat.

He cocked one ear up in a funny way he had, as though to listen. Then put his handkerchief to his lips and held it there a moment. When he drawn it away and looked meditatively for a little while at the red blotch on it, he nodded his head.

He did not take this fresh piece of news argumentatively, defiantly, as he had met the words of the doctor. This was definite, conclusive. He must deliberate. He decided that he would deliberate. That was the thing. This matter must be thought out carefully.

He looked at the typewriter in front of him, for counsel. Then suddenly his arms shot out grabbing the rusted iron frame of the typewriter and hugging it, while his head sank down upon it and he whispered to it in agony:

"God! Never another good line on you!"

This has to be told. In that moment, that battered old contraption of cast iron and rattling keys was more to Jimmie Wardwell than woman, man or child could be. It was dearer to him, it was nearer to where he thought and really lived. And he loved it and hugged it to him, as though already they were trying to take part of his soul from him. For men of Wardwell's kind are like that. When the passion of creating has once gotten fire in their souls, they are damned to live this life alone. No articulate being can come near. And in their loneliness they fasten on something connected with their passion. There have been men who have loved to the death a rickety old table at which they have worked, or even a corner of a garret room.

After a while Jimmie lurched up out of his chair and fumblingly got ready to crawl into bed. It was the first time that he had missed going down to say good night, but he dared not face Augusta tonight.

The idea of dying, physically, meant little or nothing to him. He had never thought of it. He did not think of it now. But the failures of the past months and this last sure sign of physical failure, of the end in fact, threw him into blind panic; not a panic in fear of pain, or darkness, still less of punishment. No, it was the fear that the spirit fire, burning pent up and mad within him, was to be smothered. He was afraid, afraid that he, Jimmie Wardwell, would be snuffed out before he could form and bring out the things that burned within him and craved for expression.

Shivering under the bed clothes, he moaned over and over like a hurt child: "Never another good line!" Until, again like a child in pain, he fell into a sort of sleep.

He did not hear, probably he had forgotten, the girl who came with trembling steps and beating heart to listen at his door for this breathing and then hurried back in anxious fear to her own endless vigil.

A Wardwell debonair and blithe as the early spring morning came into Augusta's sitting room after breakfast. He had swept from him all traces of the storm of the night, and Augusta knew from the first glance that she would learn nothing from him in this mood.

"The glory of the morning,

"The beauty of the dawning,

"The joy of the skies,

"Lies in her eyes—and lies—and lies—and—Oh,

"Well, maybe it only fibs,"

He chanted impudently.

Augusta was standing at the table fixing fruit for her mother. As Jimmie came up behind her she lifted up her face to be kissed. But as Jimmie stooped she quickly lifted the peeled peach she held in her hand and stuck it full into his mouth.

"Aawa—yab yab—yak!" Jimmie expostulated. Then, when he was articulate:

"Peaches is peaches, I'll admit. But some peaches is witches, you'll admit. Anyhow, I won't be kissed now till I've had a bath," he wound up defiantly.

"Come in to see mother," said Augusta serenely.

Rose Wilding lay propped among the snowy pillows and took no notice whatever of them as they came in. Her rounded face and beautiful, long, capable hands were as white as were the masses of lovely white hair that flowed down past her temples. Only her great dark blue eyes showed a bit of color. They looked straight ahead, alive, and full of knowledge, but a knowledge that seemed to have nothing to do with this present business of living. Wardwell was struck this morning more than ever by the look of complete detachment and absorption in the eyes. He had never thought much of souls as apart from bodies. But with the writing man's unconscious trick of always trying to put even the vaguest, most fugitive thoughts into words, he found himself trying to word the nameless idea. Here was a soul, he thought, living quite detached and almost independent in a beautiful and almost useless body. And he saw no reason at all why this soul, so independent, so complete to itself, could not at will leave the unnecessary body and go on about its own absorbing business.

Meanwhile he was urging:

"She made me eat half of your fruit already, Mrs. Wilding, and if you don't hurry and eat the other half, why, she'll make me eat it all, just to save it."

"Yes, eat up good, darling," Augusta urged gently, with the way that was now growing upon her of petting a child. "And don't mind him. You know I wouldn't give him even a little tiny bit of your fruit."

"Oh, good morning, Mister Jimmie," said Rose Wilding, in the quick apologetic way of one who has momentarily forgotten a politeness. "I hope the book is coming on well."

She had not spoken before for weeks. Wardwell was startled completely off his guard and the sudden mention of the book caught him on the raw and brought back the hideous, shamed cowardice of the night.

Augusta, looking quickly up at him in her own surprise, saw the agony and bitterness in his face, and wondered. Jimmie was never bitter. Then she saw his face clear, and she knew that whatever it was he had fought it down.

"Fine and dandy," he lied glibly, "only"—he paused a moment with one ear turned up whimsically, as though considering how best to place the difficulty before her—"only there's a Scotchman in it and he's the contrariest man I ever had to deal with. He's Scotch and he insists on talking a great deal, which is all wrong for a Scotchman. But, what's worse, he will talk with a North of Ireland accent. You see, the two brogues are so much alike, and I can't get him to stick to his own."

Rose Wilding reached daintily for a quarter of a peach and commented helpfully:

"I mind I knew an Eyetalian once that talked with the softest Kerry brogue you ever heard. I guess they caught him young somewhere."

Wardwell shouted uproariously, and Augusta laughed out in quick surprised happiness. Never since the very first had her mother spoken so naturally and like her dear self of other days.

While Augusta turned away a moment, Wardwell was watching her mother. She was smiling with the contagion of their laughter, but she had her eye fixed calculatingly upon Augusta. When she seemed to be convinced that it was safe, that Augusta would not turn immediately to see her, she reached out hastily and snatching a banana from the tray hid it under a pillow beside her. Then she looked up furtively, to see if Wardwell had seen her.

He winked and smiled at her, as one who compounds the felony of a friend and brother. She laughed a little confused, deprecating laugh, like a child caught in some new delinquency. Augusta looked around, glancing from her mother to Wardwell, but she saw nothing. And Jimmie never told her. He understood. Rose Wilding had always had a good appetite. And she loved fruit. She had spent some time in that place on the Island, where it was said that the attendants took all of the best that was intended for the patients. Hunger, or at least the fear of hunger had taught her to do that.

When he looked again he saw that the curtain had fallen. It was as though the spirit of Rose Wilding which for a few minutes had stirred the body and the senses to life had now gone. Only the eyes remained alive, looking, looking not at Wardwell, not at the wall, but at some problem, some question of another existence.

Augusta, understanding instantly, did not try to arouse her mother again. Resignedly, she took up the tray and went silently from the room. And Wardwell followed without a word. Not again, until the very last, did Rose Wilding open her lips to speak.

Day by day her response to the promptings of life grew less and less. With what seemed a deliberate purpose her spirit refused to know anything of what went on about her. It was as though she definitely turned her back upon life. She did not suffer. She had left all that behind and was going her own way, unmolested by the useless body.

To Wardwell the sight of the helpless, almost deserted body was sometimes uncanny. To Augusta, however, living as she did and had always done so close to the soul of her mother, these things did not greatly matter. That her mother did not speak to her, did not even look at her, was not now so hard to bear. Though she loved the big beautiful, baby-like body and petted it as she would have fondled a baby, yet she was able to realize that she must soon give it up. So that, by degrees and without consciousness of it, she dropped the mediums of the senses and found herself slipping easily and naturally over into that strange border land where her mother lived.

Wardwell was not fighting any longer. He had accepted what he thought was fate. He did not argue. He did not look farther for work.

"I shall now," he said, sitting down deliberately at his machine, "'proceed,' as they say aboard-ship—I wonder why does a navy man always say he 'proceeded' to the deck and 'proceeded' to the bottom of the ammunition well? He just ran out on deck, and he probably fell down the stairs in the other case, but he 'proceeded'—I shall, therefore, proceed to write jokes till I choke.

"The suffering public? Well, the public always suffers. What do I care for them, or it, or him—whichever it is. Must be him, I guess. The women only read the corn cure ads and the hair tonic miracles with which the advertising editor garnishes the funny page. Hang it! I never appreciated that fellow. I thought he was a low commercial bounder on that page. Nothing of the kind. He belongs there. His ads are just as old and reliable and well thumbed as any of the other jokes."

With a grin on his face he went to work, humming:

"Rip Van Winkle was a piker,

"There are some folks sleeping yet."

And because he had put off the worry that had been harping at him he found the work coming true and easy. He forgot the book and his big dreams, half way happy if he could earn enough to prevent his being an added burden to Augusta. And because he now did not greatly care, because he left the whole business on the knees of whatever gods had cared to meddle with his affairs, the work began to pay well.

Three separate eddies of life moved quietly about their round in the house. Ann the cook had taken the reins of authority from Augusta's hands and was now ruling the boarding house with a competent and jealous care. The boarders did not like her, but they knew that she was honest and remorselessly fair and that there was no appeal from her judgments. There were no complaints and the outward business of the house went on smoothly and decorously as always. In the two rooms that were now the world of Augusta and her mother everything circled about the dim little pale flame of life in her mother which Augusta was feeding with her love. And in his own room Wardwell worked craftily on, going softly, husbanding his strength from day to day, paying it out painfully, like a miser bit by bit, at the machine, making every bit count for some work done, and jealously guarding his growing weakness from Augusta's eyes. She must know before very long, he realized. But, well, who could tell what might happen? And in the meantime there was a little work to be done each day. Each line of it would be a help to her in the end.

So the three eddies of life went quietly around, touching each other and lapping a little upon each other, but each one a world by itself. Spring came and slipped well along into May, the street cries changed, the glistening pavements began to throw the heat back up into the house, and the threat of a blistering summer came upon the air. The three little worlds in the house went on so quietly, so unobtrusively, that it seemed that they might have been forgotten, that they might go on indefinitely, that they had been left out of any scheme of change.

But the change came, swift and disturbing as though it had never been expected.

Wardwell heard the cry come up in the still night from the room below him. He had been sitting in the dark, thinking of nothing, his mind at loose ends, but he knew Augusta's cry and recognized in it the trembling, very human fear of death.

As he came to the door of Rose Wilding's room he saw Augusta half kneeling on the bed holding fast to her mother's hands. To Wardwell it seemed that Rose Wilding was making a quivering, feeble struggle to rise. But Augusta evidently knew different. She was pleading in a desperate, pitiful whisper:

"Don't go! Please, darling mamma, don't go till you've known me, just for one little minute! I wont try to keep you, darling, I know you want to go. But just look at me once, so that I can see that you know your own Augusta, please darling."

The hands that Augusta held stopped their quivering struggle and Rose Wilding lay quiet, as though listening. Then slowly, naturally, she opened her eyes with the sweet clear light of perfect reason shining gently in them. And she said in a tender, confiding whisper:

"Augusta, my own. Stay close to me. It's—it's lonely—going." With a sigh as of a tired child she closed her eyes and seemed to try to cuddle to the warmth of the young body that was close to her. Then she lay quite still.

After a little Wardwell gently lifted Augusta away. She did not resist, nor did she break out weeping as he had been almost hoping that she would do. Instead, she leaned against him, begging for full assurance:

"She did know me, didn't she, Jimmie!"

"Of course, dear, of course she did."

Then Augusta went slowly over to the little cot which had been her partner in the play of the weary pitiful months and began folding it away.

Through the two days that followed Wardwell did all the necessary things with a calculated care that showed how well he had schooled himself. He saw to everything, anticipated everything, exerting himself more than he had done for weeks, yet always carefully holding himself within the limits of his strength lest a sudden breakdown should come to frighten Augusta.

It was only on the lonely ride back from the cemetery, through the sand pitted lots and broken streets of Greenpoint and across the ferry, that Jimmie began to go to pieces. He was tired, tired of the struggle to keep up, tired of the silly pretense of being a normal, cheery, good hearted fellow. Besides, Augusta did not seem to have needed him. She had not broken down. She would, he thought, have done just as well without him. And he began to pity himself inordinately.

Now he was sure that Augusta was looking at him in a thoughtful, speculative sort of way. Although he knew well enough that Augusta was not aware of his condition, yet it took only a few minutes of this bent of thought to convince him fully that she was wondering what in the world she could do with a hopelessly sick husband on her hands.

The foolish, overweaning egotism of a sick mind in a sick body took sway over him, making him forget everything but his own morbid line of thoughts. Augusta did not need him. He was of no use to her, or to anybody. He never would, in fact, be of any use. It would be better to let it end now. He had never really been Augusta's husband. He had served her as well as he could. But that was over now. She did not need him now. He pressed his self inflicted hurt home and took a sort of miserable pleasure from the pain. She at least could be happy. Why should he drag her down the long dark path with himself. He might live on and on for a deuce of a while—people did, you know. No, he was not going to let the poor girl in for anything like that.

The heady, self-centred resolution took shape rapidly, and he began to fill it in with all sorts of reasonable and thoughtful advantages.

He would drop out now, today, while things were still in their present state. If he waited at all, Augusta would at once find out his condition and she would—he knew her—immediately break up her house and pack off with him to wherever the doctors told her to take him. And he would be unable to resist once she took hold. Then, in the inevitable end, she would have spent on him whatever money she had—he had never thought to wonder whether it was much or little, or any—her home and her way of living would be gone. He would be gone. And she would be alone, among strangers, with no way of making a living, probably broken down from nursing him—He drew the whole picture and elaborated upon it.

Yes he must drop out today, quietly, without a word, and just drift—drift on over towards oblivion. Augusta would miss him, but she would not really need him. It would be all very simple. A short time, maybe only a few days, of knocking around and he would be completely down sick. Then some hospital or other would pick him up, under any name he happened to be able to think of, and—and everything would settle itself without fuss. He particularly did not want any fuss. He was tired and he had found a way to avoid all bother.

He turned smiling cheerily to Augusta. He found her looking at him, studying him with a grave, and, somehow, a different, interest.

Augusta had found herself face to face with a problem of her own.

She had known for a long time that there was something pressing on Jimmie's mind. She knew, of course, that he was not altogether well. But, with her own wonderful health and soundness, she could not think of mere illness as the cause of his trouble. She was sure that the trouble was in his heart. He had not been the same since they had known definitely that her mother must so go.

Was that his trouble? He was, in a way, free now.

He had been kind and dear. He had done all that she had asked him—Yes, she remembered now with confusion, she had literally asked him. And he had done everything that she had needed and more than he had promised.

Did he want to go now?

If he did, she must make him go. For she knew well enough, she thought, that Jimmie would never let her know that he wanted to go. He would just stay on and be kind and say nothing. But she must not let him do that.

Yet, with all her reasoning and searching, Augusta was first a woman. There was just one question, and she knew it. With the simple, terrible directness of a child she put it to herself. Did he love her? She had never known, really. He was so kind, and so good an actor.

They were alone now, for the first time. There was now no one, nothing that they had to think of but themselves.

Fearless and direct as she was, Augusta quivered with the dread of parting, for she had come to love the very thought of Jimmie's nearness. But she knew that they were now facing the elementary facts of life. Childlike, she had not anticipated this hour. She saw now with a startling and vivid reality that, for the sake of both their lives, she must know, before another day, whether Jimmie loved her as a man must love a woman.

A forgotten and unbidden memory came to her in that instant, and although she did not imagine that it had any bearing upon her problem she grasped it and brought it out into the light, never thinking where the consequences might lead.

"Jimmie," she said, turning quickly, "maybe you won't remember, but one day last September I saw you in the Square talking to a lady. She had been driving along in an automobile, and she saw you and called to you. Then she drove the machine up to the curb and stopped, and you came and stood with your foot on the running board. While you talked she seemed to be pleading with you about something. Who was she?"

"Ah-ha!" said Jimmie gaily. "At last! I am now an accredited and confirmed husband. My wife has begun to delve into my dark past. I am now a married man! Listen, my dear, and I will unfold unto thee a tale:

"That lady—and she was a tall dark lady, mind you—was actually trying to pay me back borrowed money! Did you ever hear the like?"

"She'd borrowed money from you?" said Augusta, with thoughtless emphasis. "Does sound like a joke, doesn't it," Jimmie admitted, with just a tinge of bitterness in his voice. Augusta had unwittingly touched the sore spot which he himself had just been prodding. "But—"

"Oh, I didn't mean that! Please forgive me, Jimmie, I didn't mean it that way at all!"

"It's all right," said Jimmie lightly. "I can explain. There had been a time when she was not as prosperous as she appeared that day. And there also had been times—short and fleeting as they were—times when I had plenty of money. Therefore." He turned his hands out before him in a sort of Latin way, as though nothing could be plainer.

Augusta sat back, saying nothing. She was sorry that she had spoken now, and about this. Jimmie, she felt, had told the literal truth. And the incident seemed to make it more difficult to lead up to the things which she must say today.

They rode to the door in silence, both subdued by the nearness of a crisis which each foresaw in a different way. As the lugubrious coach drove away they stood on the sidewalk looking after it, both half conscious that it was the last vestige of an existence with which they were now finished. When it had trundled around the nearest corner and disappeared they turned to each other and, instinctively, like two solemn, slightly frightened children, took hands and went stealing up the steps.

Augusta did not miss Wardwell until evening. When he did not appear for supper, she ran up the stairs to bring him, thinking that he had perhaps fallen asleep. She had been busying herself through the afternoon, putting off the inevitable. And now she decided that it could be put off for still a little longer. She need not speak just yet.

His door stood open, but Jimmie was not there. She wondered that he should have gone out today, for she knew he was tired. But, maybe, he had just gone down to the street, and perhaps he would be coming in any minute. She lingered a little, looking around at the signs of Jimmie's ways—a pair of shoes in the middle of the floor, a coat draped perilously from the arm of a chair, a necktie festooning a doorknob, for Jimmie, while he was always wholesomely clean, was certainly not orderly. And then the loose, scrambled piles of papers all over his desk. She had often wanted to fuss among them, to straighten them out and make neat piles of them. But she had learned that this was one of the points on which Jimmie would fight. Anyone might hide his shoes away or hang up his coat or take his neckties away to press, but touch that desk and he would roar. And she had always understood and loved the little boyish jealousy with which he guarded everything he wrote until it was printed.

She went over on tiptoe, to take just a peep at what was on the typewriter.

As if he had known that she would do just this, the words flashed cruelly up at her from the middle of the white paper:

"I am going away, on urgent business—I am very tired."

Augusta sank down into the chair, covering the words with her arm, sobbing:

"Oh, Jimmie, Jimmie, did you have to hurt me this way! I wouldn't have tried to hold you. I would have let you go, and blessed you for the dear good boy you've been to me. I know you were tired. But you didn't need to hurt me!"

After a little she sat up and forced herself to look at the line of words as they stared up at her. And as she studied them she found herself listening for the sound of Jimmie's voice saying them. Then she knew why Jimmie had written the words instead of saying them to her.

She would not have believed him. And Jimmie had known that.

Word by word and tone by tone, she made him say it over to her mind's ear and eye, even to the little lift in his shoulder with which he would have ended—And she knew!

Jimmie did not mean that at all. He did not want to go away from her!

"Urgent business!" Love laughed up in her heart. Jimmie and urgent business!

And then the quiet, thinking Augusta came back. This was no caprice, no mere whim of Jimmie's. He had tried to make her believe that he was tired and only wanted escape. He had deliberately tried to hurt her so that she would believe. Jimmie would not have done that without a powerful reason.

And he was gone. Nothing could be more definite than that. If she had seen him packing trunks for a week his going could not have been so convincing. He had simply changed into his everyday street suit and walked out, humming:

"The Priest of the Parish,

"The Clerk and his man

"Went 'round the church yard

"With a red hot brick in his han'."

Augusta rose and stole to the door to peer down the stairs, half frightened by the distinctness of her image of him. The impression that she had gotten, of Jimmie walking down the stairs, hands in pockets, humming that tuneless old rhyme of his, had been so vivid that for the moment she had thought it real, had believed that she was hearing and seeing Jimmie go down the stairs.

The blank unconcern of the stairway looking back at her chilled her. Jimmie was gone. A sudden feeling of physical weakness that came over her now brought up to her one thing that she had overlooked. She remembered that she had never really found out what Dr. Gardner had said to Jimmie that night when he had gone to see him. Jimmie had baffled her with many words, both wise and foolish. And the doctor had not told her anything definite. They had both treated her as they would have answered a child. But that was different, then she had been living only for her mother.

Now the conviction came to her that the key to Jimmie's action was to be found in his talk that evening with the doctor. He had never really been the same since. So it was a quiet, determined Augusta who faced the doctor that evening.

"I told him that he was in very bad shape and that he would be worse if he didn't get out of the city at once. That was some weeks ago. But I imagine he went away laughing at me a little. He seemed to have some absurd notion that you needed him, that he was helping you by staying." Doctor Gardner wasted no words, for he did not feel that he was any longer bound by the promise of silence that he had made to Wardwell.

"I needed him every moment," said Augusta slowly; "and he stayed until he had done everything."

"Stayed? Has he gone now?"

"No no," said Augusta quickly. "I was just thinking—That was all." Suddenly it seemed to her that she must not on any account admit that Jimmie had gone away. She must find him now, tonight. She must not let it become established that he had gone at all.

"Of course, you should have let me know," she went on hurriedly. "But then, I know Jimmie. He just talked you into keeping it from me. He can talk anybody into anything if he sets his mind to it. Now I must get home right away." She was already on her way to the door, and the doctor, although he had helpful advice ready to offer her, did not try to detain her. He saw that, just now, she wanted nothing but to get away. So he followed her resignedly to the street door, only saying:

"You know that if you need me in any way—"

From the steps she turned and, not trusting herself to speak, grasped his hand impulsively. Then she was gone.

As he stood looking down into the dusk after her, he wondered why she turned west, away from her home. He cleared his throat, to call after her.

But, well, she had always done things herself, in her own way. And she was always right.

Augusta did not know that Wardwell a few hours earlier had sauntered just this way that she was hurrying. She did not know as she crossed West street, now silent and deserted as a country road, that Jimmie had walked recklessly through its roaring traffic, weakly half hoping that something would happen to him. She did not know that he had stood just where she came to stand, looking down over the railing into the slip between two docks, asking questions of the lapping water.

A dock watchman who stood within a few feet of her put his lantern out of his hand, merely as a precaution. She did not look like any of the many kinds that he had seen coming to look too curiously at the water. But, she was in trouble. Happy people do not come peering down into rivers. He cautiously moved a little closer to her.

Then she turned and, without so much as a look back, crossed the street again and turned north.

"Whatever she was lookin' for," the watchman grumbled, "it wasn't here."

Augusta was not thinking or reasoning, or consciously searching for Jimmie. She had loosened her mind, as it were, and was letting herself drift in his wake. She understood him now. She knew now what he had been going through. She was following every thought of his as it had worked through his brain and had turned out into action. She was feeling with him and suffering the hurt that he had felt. But she was not following him now because she pitied him. It was not because she wished to care for him, to mother him, to make good her debt to him.

She was following him now because she loved him. Up to now she had needed him, his protection, his kindness, his dear thoughtfulness and his cheer. Now she needed him because she had found out, in this last half hour, that she loved him with a desperation that would have frightened her if she had been able to think of it. She did not care whether he was sick or well. She did not care whether he wanted to stay or go. She would find him. She would hold him. She would not stop walking until she had found him. And then she would put her arms around him. And not any other woman, nor even death itself would get him from her.

Now she knew that she was on the right way. Her start towards the river had been a false one, just as Jimmie's had been. Jimmie had had no more real thought of harming himself than she had had of finding the end of her search in the river.

He had just set himself adrift aimlessly, and unconsciously she seemed to know that mere physical weariness would bring him to where all the drifting logs of the city's stream sooner or later come to rest, the park benches.

Through the endless night she trudged, scanning the thousand figures that weariness and misery and failure take when they finally slump down to the friendly darkness of a shaded bench.

Policemen looked sharply after her. Good men looked wonderingly after her. Bad men looked discriminatingly after her. Her soul was sick with the misery and the sordidness that she searched among. But her heart was not afraid. She was right, and love was at the end of her search.

In the gray, haggard dawn she saw him at a little distance, sitting jauntily erect, his hand extended resting lightly on his cane, peering interestedly up into the coming light of the new day—as though he had that moment sat down to enjoy the fresh morning and to wonder at the miracle of dawn.

Augusta trembled in every aching nerve, but her heart laughed as she stole toward him. It was so like him, sitting up making a play at interest, when, as she knew, he probably didn't care whether the day dawned or not.

Then with a little desperate run she was kneeling on the bench beside him and had fairly dragged his head into her arms and was kissing him wildly, passionately.

Now Wardwell said not a word. He did not at first seem surprised. It is doubtful if, knowing Augusta and remembering her actions in those days when her mother had been lost, he really had thought that he could lose himself from her in the way he had taken.

But when he found Augusta's arms tight around him something within him awoke with a start. Augusta had kissed him before this—But—

Jimmie Wardwell knew as little of women's love and the ways of it as most men do. But he suddenly straightened up and deliberately pulled one of Augusta's arms away and caught her little face in his hand and looked boldly, hungrily down into her eyes.

For a little while, unashamed and fearless, her eyes gave him back his answer. Then her lashes dropped in surrender, and Wardwell, as though life and strength had suddenly been poured into him, caught her up bodily to him and hugging her tight started to carry her to the nearest street.

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