nd a mystery behind
its stones and mortar.

And then, as suddenly as I speak, I realized that a window on the second
floor was being opened gently. I saw two hands rest for a moment on the
sill, some small object was dropped into the grass below, and my ears
were shocked by a low cry of suffering with which few of the millions
which I have heard could be compared!

It is always so, I find. We are ever forced by pure reason away from
those delicate subconscious whisperings. I had sensed something beyond
the wall, and as science, after all, is not so much truth as a search
for truth, I would perhaps have done well to have retained an open mind.
Instead, I had sneered at the whole idea. And to rebuke me the house, as
if it were itself a personality, had for a fleeting second disclosed the
presence of some hidden secret. The window was closed, and then I stood
upon the deserted thoroughfare, the hum of my fretting limousine behind
me, staring up at the moonlit front of the Estabrooks' home. You may be
sure that it was with a mind full of speculations that I left the spot,
asking myself as MacMechem had asked himself, what was behind the wall,
what was the thing which was determining the question of the life or
death of so lovable a child as little Virginia Marbury....

It is already raining. As I write again, the slap of it on the window
makes one feel the possibilities of loneliness in city life....

It is hard for me to describe what a fascination there is in
campaigning against death in those special extraordinary cases where the
doctor becomes something more than a man of science and is also a man of
affections. It is impossible to describe the irritation of being unable
to act in cases like Virginia's--cases where the fight is made between
strength of body and mind, on the one hand, and some deep-seated
infection, like meningitis, on the other. I was more than anxious for
the late afternoon hour when I could again go to the child. Her blue
eyes, as deep and mysterious as the sea, called to me, if I may use that
word. And there was something else that called to me as well--the blue
wall--blank blue wall beyond the bed.

I found Miss Peters there, sitting in the patient's room and the
gathering gloom of dusk, her muscular hands flattened upon her knees in
the position of a red granite Rameses from the Nile, looking out the
window at the waving treetops of the park and the clouds of falling
leaves which were being dr