hen I put down the grip and folded up like a
jack-knife on the porch floor.

When I came around something hot was trickling down my neck, and a
despairing voice was saying, "Oh, I don't seem to be able to pour it
into your mouth. Please open your eyes."

"But I don't want it in my eyes," I replied dreamily. "I haven't any
idea what came over me. It was the shoes, I think: the left one is a
red-hot torture." I was sitting by that time and looking across into her
face.

Never before or since have I fainted, but I would do it joyfully, a
dozen times a day, if I could waken again to the blissful touch of soft
fingers on my face, the hot ecstasy of coffee spilled by those fingers
down my neck. There was a thrill in every tone of her voice that
morning. Before long my loyalty to McKnight would step between me and
the girl he loved: life would develop new complexities. In those early
hours after the wreck, full of pain as they were, there was nothing
of the suspicion and distrust that came later. Shorn of our gauds and
baubles, we were primitive man and woman, together: our world for the
hour was the deserted farm-house, the slope of wheat-field that led to
the road, the woodland lot, the pasture.

We breakfasted together across the homely table. Our cheerfulness, at
first sheer reaction, became less forced as we ate great slices of bread
from the granny oven back of the house, and drank hot fluid that smelled
like coffee and tasted like nothing that I have ever swallowed. We found
cream in stone jars, sunk deep in the chill water of the spring house.
And there were eggs, great yellow-brown ones,--a basket of them.

So, like two children awakened from a nightmare, we chattered over
our food: we hunted mutual friends, we laughed together at my feeble
witticisms, but we put the horror behind us resolutely. After all, it
was the hat with the green ribbons that brought back the strangeness of
the situation.

All along I had had the impression that Alison West was deliberately
putting out of her mind something that obtruded now and then. It brought
with it a return of the puzzled expression that I had surprised early in
the day, before the wreck. I caught it once, when, breakfast over, she
was tightening the sling that held the broken arm. I had prolonged the
morning meal as much as I could, but when the wooden clock with the pink
roses on the dial pointed to half after ten, and the mother with the
duplicate youngsters had n