o his knocking, and after an interval Rainer said:
"Look here--we'd better go on."

"No!"

"I can, perfectly--"

"You sha'n't go to the house, I say!" Faxon redoubled his blows, and
at length steps sounded on the stairs. Rainer was leaning against the
lintel, and as the door opened the light from the hall flashed on his
pale face and fixed eyes. Faxon caught him by the arm and drew him in.

"It _was_ cold out there." he sighed; and then, abruptly, as if
invisible shears at a single stroke had cut every muscle in his body, he
swerved, drooped on Faxon's arm, and seemed to sink into nothing at his
feet.

The lodge-keeper and Faxon bent over him, and somehow, between them,
lifted him into the kitchen and laid him on a sofa by the stove.

The lodge-keeper, stammering: "I'll ring up the house," dashed out of
the room. But Faxon heard the words without heeding them: omens mattered
nothing now, beside this woe fulfilled. He knelt down to undo the fur
collar about Rainer's throat, and as he did so he felt a warm moisture
on his hands. He held them up, and they were red....

V

The palms threaded their endless line along the yellow river. The little
steamer lay at the wharf, and George Faxon, sitting in the verandah of
the wooden hotel, idly watched the coolies carrying the freight across
the gang-plank.

He had been looking at such scenes for two months. Nearly five had
elapsed since he had descended from the train at Northridge and strained
his eyes for the sleigh that was to take him to Weymore: Weymore, which
he was never to behold!... Part of the interval--the first part--was
still a great grey blur. Even now he could not be quite sure how he
had got back to Boston, reached the house of a cousin, and been thence
transferred to a quiet room looking out on snow under bare trees. He
looked out a long time at the same scene, and finally one day a man
he had known at Harvard came to see him and invited him to go out on a
business trip to the Malay Peninsula.

"You've had a bad shake-up, and it'll do you no end of good to get away
from things."

When the doctor came the next day it turned out that he knew of the plan
and approved it. "You ought to be quiet for a year. Just loaf and look
at the landscape," he advised.

Paxon felt the first faint stirrings of curiosity.

"What's been the matter with me, anyway?"

"Well, over-work, I suppose. You must have been bottling up for a bad
breakdown before you star