nausea he had felt the evening
after the circus. And, though it was partly the long sweat of anguish
which had benumbed him, his apathy was pierced, at times, by a bodily
horror of the scene of his struggle. At night he faced the grotesque
masks of the Cross-Roads men and the brutal odds again; over and over
he felt the blows, and clapped his hand to where the close fire of Bob
Skillett's pistol burned his body.

And, except for the release from pain, he rejoiced less and less in
his recovery. He remembered a tedious sickness of his childhood and
how beautiful he had thought the world, when he began to get well, how
electric the open air blowing in at the window, how green the smile of
earth, and how glorious to live and see the open day again. He had none
of that feeling now. No pretty vision came again near his bed, and he
beheld his convalescence as a mistake. He had come to a jumping-off
place in his life--why had they not let him jump? What was there left
but the weary plod, plod, and dust of years?

He could have gone back to Carlow in better spirit if it had not been
for the few dazzling hours of companionship which had transformed it to
a paradise, but, gone, left a desert. She, by the sight of her, had made
him wish to live, and now, that he saw her no more, she made him wish
to die. How little she had cared for him, since she told him she did
not care, when he had not meant to ask her. He was weary, and at last he
longed to find the line of least resistance and follow it; he had done
hard things for a long time, but now he wanted to do something easy.
Under the new genius--who was already urging that the paper should
be made a daily--the "Herald" could get along without him; and the
"White-Caps" would bother Carlow no longer; and he thought that Kedge
Halloway, an honest man, if a dull one, was sure to be renominated for
Congress at the district convention which was to meet at Plattville in
September--these were his responsibilities, and they did not fret him.
Everything was all right. There was only one thought which thrilled him:
his impression that she had come to the hospital to see him was not a
delusion; she had really been there--as a humane, Christian person,
he said to himself. One day he told Meredith of his vision, and Tom
explained that it was no conjuration of fever.

"But I thought she'd gone abroad," said Harkless, staring.

"They had planned to," answered his friend. "They gave it up for som