e asked.

"Ah, don't you see?" he cried. "I want it to last for a thousand,
thousand years, just as it is! You've made me so rich, I'm a miser. I
wouldn't have one thing different--nothing, nothing!"

"Dear Bibbs!" she said, and laughed happily.

CHAPTER XXIII

Bibbs continued to live in the shelter of his dream. He had told Edith,
after his ineffective effort to be useful in her affairs, that he had
decided that he was "a member of the family"; but he appeared to have
relapsed to the retired list after that one attempt at participancy--he
was far enough detached from membership now. These were turbulent days
in the New House, but Bibbs had no part whatever in the turbulence--he
seemed an absent-minded stranger, present by accident and not wholly
aware that he was present. He would sit, faintly smiling over pleasant
imaginings and dear reminiscences of his own, while battle raged between
Edith and her father, or while Sheridan unloosed jeremiads upon the
sullen Roscoe, who drank heavily to endure them. The happy dreamer
wandered into storm-areas like a somnambulist, and wandered out again
unawakened. He was sorry for his father and for Roscoe, and for Edith
and for Sibyl, but their sufferings and outcries seemed far away.

Sibyl was under Gurney's care. Roscoe had sent for him on Sunday night,
not long after Bibbs returned the abandoned wraps; and during the first
days of Sibyl's illness the doctor found it necessary to be with her
frequently, and to install a muscular nurse. And whether he would or
no, Gurney received from his hysterical patient a variety of pungent
information which would have staggered anybody but a family physician.
Among other things he was given to comprehend the change in Bibbs, and
why the zinc-eater was not putting a lump in the operator's gizzard as
of yore.

Sibyl was not delirious--she was a thin little ego writhing and
shrieking in pain. Life had hurt her, and had driven her into hurting
herself; her condition was only the adult's terrible exaggeration of
that of a child after a bad bruise--there must be screaming and telling
mother all about the hurt and how it happened. Sibyl babbled herself
hoarse when Gurney withheld morphine. She went from the beginning to the
end in a breath. No protest stopped her; nothing stopped her.

"You ought to let me die!" she wailed. "It's cruel not to let me die!
What harm have I ever done to anybody that you want to keep me alive?
Just look at m