l in a day. For weeks she was
haunted merely by an unquiet suspicion. The cough still racked her night
and morning, and the fever came each evening, but the old potency seemed
to have gone from both. She tried to believe at first that this was one
of those false rallies so common before the end.

The full, maddening realization came to her on a day when Ewing walked
with her to the lake. He turned on her suddenly when they had mounted a
slope, seized both her hands, and looked long into her eyes with a
certain grave wonder.

"You are made new," he said at last. She trembled in a sudden panic,
divining the truth of it, feeling, as he spoke, a great rush of life
overwhelming her.

"You are living again, you are going to live. I knew you would live." He
still gripped her hands. It was as if he had drawn her, warm and
pulsing, out of all the wintry death about them. She could not face him,
but released her hands and turned away. He had seen truly. She had
relaxed utterly when she came, to waver unresistingly down into the cool
abyss of her despair. But some indomitable brute thing had risen in her
while she slept, to fight for life, and to fire her whole being with its
triumph. While she had rested and waited in that luxury of
self-abandonment she had been cheated of her victory--betrayed back to
life.

Trying now to think what life would mean to her, she was overwhelmed
with shame and dismay. With death so near things had been simple. But
how could she live on and face Ewing, shaming herself and shaming him in
the darkness of his belief about her?

They walked back to the cabin in silence. Ewing, too, she felt, saw the
future to be less simple now.

"I shall know what to do," he said, as they reached the door; and there
was again in his eyes that puzzling look of some fixed purpose. For the
first time this vaguely alarmed her now, and she questioned him swiftly
with her eyes. But he only pointed to his mother's portrait--they had
entered the studio--and said, "Do you think I'd do less for you than I
would for her?"

She could endure neither his own look nor the mother's, and fled to her
room. There she studied her face in the glass. It was all true. She was
going to live, and she sickened at the thought. Again it was a time for
tears and laughter.

CHAPTER XXIX

THE AWAKENING

The white giant, sun-stricken, drooping languidly, crumbled and
dissolved before their eyes. The air softened. The streams rus