, Jethro Bass
worships her."

"If nursing could cure him, I'd trust her to do it. She's a natural-born
nurse."

The two physicians were talking in low tones in the little garden behind
the store when Jethro came out of the doorway.

"He looks as if he were suffering too," said the Boston physician, and
he walked toward Jethro and laid a hand upon his shoulders. "I give him
until winter, my friend," said Dr. Coles.

Jethro Bass sat down on the doorstep--on that same millstone where he
had talked with Cynthia many years before--and was silent for a long
while. The doctor was used to scenes of sorrow, but the sight of this
man's suffering unnerved him, and he turned from it.

"D-doctor?" said Jethro, at last.

The doctor turned again: "Yes?" he said.

"D-doctor--if Wetherell hadn't b'en to the capital would he have
lived--if he hadn't been to the capital?"

"My friend," said Dr. Coles, "if Mr. Wetherell had always lived in a
warm house, and had always been well fed, and helped over the rough
places and shielded from the storms, he might have lived longer. It is a
marvel to me that he has lived so long."

And then the doctor went way, back to Boston. Many times in his long
professional life had the veil been lifted for him--a little. But as he
sat in the train he said to himself that in this visit to the hamlet
of Coniston he had had the strangest glimpse of all. William Wetherell
rallied, as Dr. Coles had predicted, from that first sharp attack, and
one morning they brought up a reclining chair which belonged to Mr.
Satterlee, the minister, and set it in the window. There, in the still
days of the early autumn, Wetherell looked down upon the garden he
had grown to love, and listened to the song of Coniston Water. There
Cynthia, who had scarcely left his side, read to him from Keats and
Shelley and Tennyson--yet the thought grew on her that he did not seem
to hear. Even that wonderful passage of Milton's, beginning "So sinks
the day-star in the ocean bed," which he always used to beg her to
repeat, did not seem to move him now.

The neighbors came and sat with him, but he would not often speak.
Cheery Lem Hallowell and his wife, and Cousin Ephraim, to talk about
the war, hobbling slowly up the stairs--for rheumatism had been added to
that trouble of the Wilderness bullet now, and Ephraim was getting
along in years; and Rias Richardson stole up in his carpet slippers;
and Moses, after his chores were done, and A