Snow had fallen in the night—a wet snow, mingled with sleet and fleering rain. It had spread a flashing, silver sheen over the vast wastes, and the sun glinted and laughed from a web of woven jewels. It gleamed from every needle of the stalwart evergreens, which stood around in dazzling ice-armor, keeping guard above the virgin snow asleep, with its white curves dimpling beside the rough, bearish mountains. Overhead the sky bent in tranquil baby-blue.

The beauty of the frozen morning hung cheerily about the row of pillowed chairs wheeled before the glass sides of the long sun-parlor. To some who gazed from these chairs it was a glimpse of the world into which they would soon return; to others it was but the symbol of another weary winter of lengthening waiting. But to each it brought a comfort and a hope.

The same fair whiteness of the outdoors shone mockingly through Daunt’s window. Its very loveliness seemed cruel, with that insidious raillery with which Nature, be she gloomy or bright, fits our darker moods. Through the night, while Margaret’s phantom touch lay upon his forehead, and the ghosts of her kisses crept across his hand, he had fought with his longing, and he had won. But it was a triumphless victory. The pulpy ashes of his own denial were in his mouth. He had asked so little—only to see her, to hear her step, and the lisping movement of her dress, and the cadence of her voice—only to feel the touch of her fingers and the drench of her warm, young life! She loved him; his love, he told himself, incomplete as it was, would take the place of all for her. And in his heart he told himself that he lied!But the rayless darkness of that inner room cast no shadow in the cozy sun-parlor. There, the doctor, with youthful step that belied his graying hair, strode about among the patients, chatting lightly, and full of good-natured badinage. Then, leaving them smiling, he went back to his private office. As he entered, Margaret rose from the chair where she waited, and came hurriedly toward him. She was pale, and her slender hands were clasping nervously about her wrists.

“Doctor,” she began, and stopped an instant. Then stumblingly, “I have just got your note. I came to ask you—I want to beg you to—not to make me go back! I—want to stay so much! I know so well how to wait on him. You know I wasn’t a regular nurse at the hospital. It was only a trial. Dr. Goodno doesn’t expect me back.”

He drew out a chair for her and made her sit down, wiping his glasses laboriously. “My dear child—Miss Langdon—” he said, “I know how you feel. My good friend Mrs. Goodno wrote me of you when Mr. Daunt came to us. She is a splendid, noble-hearted woman, and she wrote of you as though you were her own daughter. You see,” he continued, “when you first came, it was suspected that Mr. Daunt’s peculiar paralysis might be of a hysteric type, and might yield naturally, under treatment, with a bettering physical condition, or, possibly, under the impulse of some extra nervous stimulus. Such cases are not unmet with.”

“Yes, yes,” she said anxiously.

He polished his glasses again. “I am sorry to say,” he went on, “that we have long ago abandoned this hope, as you know. Such being the case, it seems, under the peculiar circumstances, advisable—that is, it would be better not to——” He stopped, feeling that he was floundering in deeper water than he thought.

“Oh, if you only knew!” Margaret’s voice was shaking. “I came here because I love him, doctor, and because he loved me! Surely I can at least stay by him. I am experienced enough to nurse him. It’s the only thing left now for me to be happy in. He wants me! He’s more cheerful when I am with him. I know he doesn’t really need a special nurse, but—I don’t have to earn the money for it. I do it because I like it.”

“My dear young lady,” the doctor said, wheeling, with suspicious abruptness, in his chair, “be sure that it is only your own best good that is considered. There are cruel facts in life that we have to face. This seems very hard for you now, I know. It is hard! He is a brave man, and believe me, my child, he knows best.”

Margaret half rose from her seat. “‘He’?—he knows best—Richard? Does he say—did Mr. Daunt——”

He took her hand as a father might. “It was not easy for him,” he said simply.

She bowed her head in piteous acquiescence, and held his fingers a moment, her lips striving courageously for a smile, and then went silently out.As she passed Daunt’s closed door on the way to her room, she stretched out her arms and touched its dark panels softly, fearfully, and then leaned forward, and once laid her lips against the hard grained wood.

An hour later, from where he lay, Daunt could see the bulbous, ulstered figure of the colored driver as he waited by the porch to take his single passenger to the distant Lake station. He could see the rake of the horses’ ears as the man swung his arms, pounding his sides to keep the blood circulating. His steamy breath made a curdling smoke-cloud about his peaked cap.

Daunt’s blood forged painfully as the square ormolu clock on the mantel pointed near to the hour. There were lines of sleeplessness beneath his eyes; his face was instinct with suffering. Through his open door came the mingled tones of conversation in the rooms beyond.

He was sitting up, his vigorous hair, grown over-long during his illness, blending its hue with that of the dark chair-cushion. The white collar that he wore seemed to have lent its pallor to his cheeks.

He felt himself to have aged during the night. Through the long weeks since his accident, he had hoped against hope. The doctors had talked speciously of change of scene and bracing mountain air. He had been glad enough to leave the foreboding atmosphere of the hospital for this more cheery hill-top harbor. He had never known nor asked by what arrangement Margaret was now with him; it had seemed only natural that it should be so. His patches of delirium memories were every one brightened by her face and touch, and this state had merged itself gradually into the waking consciousness when she was always by. Without questioning, he had come to realize that whatever might have risen between them in the past was forever gone, and rested content in her near presence and the promise of the future.

But as the weeks dragged themselves by he had come to know, with a kind slowness of realization, that this hope must die. In their late talks, both of them had tacitly recognized this. In the night of his growing despair, she had been his one star. Now he must shut out that ray with his own hands and turn his face to the intolerable dark.

When her head had been next his on the pillow, with his nostrils full of the clean, grassy fragrance of her hair—when her hand had closed his lips and her voice had plead with him, he had seen, as through a lightning-rift, the enormity of the selfishness with which he had let his soul be tempted. From that moment there was for him but one way—this way. And he had accepted it unflinchingly, heroically.

The spring of the wide stairway broke and turned half way up, and from where he sat his eye sighted the landing and that slim figure coming slowly down. It was the old Margaret in street dress. Above the fur of her close, fawn cloth coat, her hopeless eyes looked over the balustrade along which her slight, gloved hand slid weakly, as though seeking support for her limbs.

She crossed the threshold and came toward him, with her eyes half closed, as though in a maze of grief. The hollows beneath them looked bruised, and her features pinched like a child’s with the cold. Gropingly and blindly, one hand reached out to him, the other she pressed close to her throat. She was bathed in a wave of violent trembling.

Every stretching fibre in Daunt’s being responded. He could feel the shuddering palpitation through her suÈde glove. His self-restraint hung about him like heavy chains, which the quiver of an eyelash, the impulse of a sigh, would start into clamorous vibration.

He looked up and their eyes met once. Her gaze clung to him. His lips formed, rather than spoke, the word “Good-by.” Then he put her hand aside and turned his head from her, not to see her go.

His strained ear heard her uncertain footfalls, and the agony of his mind counted them! Now she was by the table. Now her hand was on the knob. Now—— He sprang around, facing her at the sound of a stumble and a dulled blow; she had pitched forward against the opened door, swaying—about to fall.

As her knees touched the floor, a scream burst shrill in the silence of the room—a scream that pierced the drowsy quiet of the sun-parlor and brought the doctor running through the hall.

“Margaret!”

Its intensity dragged her from the swoon. She turned her head. Daunt was standing in the middle of the floor, his eyes shining with fluctuant fire, his arms—both arms—stretched out toward her.

“Margaret!” he screamed. “Margaret! I can walk!”