before he reached her and
stepped to the ground.

Horton put out his hand as if to hold her back and spoke pleadingly:
"Won't you drive up to my house, Mrs. Alexander? They will take him up
there."

"Take me to him now, please. I shall not make any trouble."

The group of men down under the riverbank fell back when they saw a
woman coming, and one of them threw a tarpaulin over the stretcher. They
took off their hats and caps as Winifred approached, and although she
had pulled her veil down over her face they did not look up at her. She
was taller than Horton, and some of the men thought she was the tallest
woman they had ever seen. "As tall as himself," some one whispered.
Horton motioned to the men, and six of them lifted the stretcher
and began to carry it up the embankment. Winifred followed them the
half-mile to Horton's house. She walked quietly, without once breaking
or stumbling. When the bearers put the stretcher down in Horton's spare
bedroom, she thanked them and gave her hand to each in turn. The men
went out of the house and through the yard with their caps in their
hands. They were too much confused to say anything as they went down the
hill.

Horton himself was almost as deeply perplexed. "Mamie," he said to his
wife, when he came out of the spare room half an hour later, "will you
take Mrs. Alexander the things she needs? She is going to do everything
herself. Just stay about where you can hear her and go in if she wants
you."

Everything happened as Alexander had foreseen in that moment of
prescience under the river. With her own hands she washed him clean of
every mark of disaster. All night he was alone with her in the still
house, his great head lying deep in the pillow. In the pocket of his
coat Winifred found the letter that he had written her the night before
he left New York, water-soaked and illegible, but because of its length,
she knew it had been meant for her.

For Alexander death was an easy creditor. Fortune, which had smiled
upon him consistently all his life, did not desert him in the end.
His harshest critics did not doubt that, had he lived, he would have
retrieved himself. Even Lucius Wilson did not see in this accident the
disaster he had once foretold.

When a great man dies in his prime there is no surgeon who can say
whether he did well; whether or not the future was his, as it seemed to
be. The mind that society had come to regard as a powerful and reliable
machine, ded