y're all the bigger fools when they do jump."

"Pardon me, I didn't catch--"

"Oh, nothing," said Aleck, half irritably. "I only said Jim needed a
poke, like that heifer over in the next field."

Agatha understood the boyish irritation, cloaking the love of the man.
"You may be able to get more information about your cousin from Mr.
Hand," she said. "He would be likely to know as much as anybody."

"Well, however it happened, he's here now!"

"Though if it had not been for his fearful struggle for me, he would
not have been so ill," said Agatha miserably. Aleck, with one foot on
the low step of the piazza, stopped and turned squarely toward her.
His face was no less miserable than Agatha's, but behind his
wretchedness and anxiety was some masculine reserve of power, and a
longer view down the corridors of time. He held her eye with a look of
great earnestness.

"I love old Jim, Miss Redmond. We've been boys and men together, and
good fellows always. But don't think that I'd regret his struggle for
you, as you call it, even if it should mean the worst. He couldn't
have done otherwise, and I wouldn't have had him. And if it's to be
a--a home run--why, then, Jim would like that far better than to die of
old age or liver complaint. It's all right, Miss Redmond."

Aleck's slow words came with a double meaning to Agatha. She heard,
through them, echoes of James Hambleton's boyhood; she saw a picture of
his straight and dauntless youth. She held out to Aleck a hand that
trembled, but her face shone with gratitude.

Aleck took her hand respectfully, kindly, in his warm grasp.
"Besides," he said simply, "we won't give up. He's got a fighting
chance yet."

CHAPTER XVII

THE TURN OF THE TIDE

Lights in a country house at night are often the signal of birth or
death, sometimes of both. The old red house threw its beacon from
almost every window that night, and seemed mutely to defy the onslaught
of enveloping darkness, whether Plutonic or Stygian. Time was when
Parson Thayer's library lamp burned nightly into the little hours, and
through the uncurtained windows the churchyard ghosts, had they
wandered that way, could have seen his long thin form, wrapped in a
paisley cloth dressing-gown, sitting in the glow. He would have been
reading some old leather-bound volume, and would have remained for
hours almost as quiet and noiseless as the ghosts themselves. Now he
had stepped across his threshold an