s forehead, of a cheek laid close to his; and he could
still hear the gentle but commanding voice that told him to be
patient--to be still--that life was coming back to him.

Life! As if he cared for life! Had he not spent years on years in
seeking what just now had been in his very grasp, only to be withdrawn
by two caressing hands? And Doctor Morris, on the day of his final
visit, had left him no possibility of misunderstanding.

"Miss Gaylord has saved your life," he said. "I could do little. It
was her nursing that pulled you through."

He wanted much to tell the doctor just how much value he placed on
that life. But to what purpose? Doctors lived in their own peculiar
atmosphere of conceit and self-deception, crowing like a hen over a
new-laid egg whenever they chanced to bring back a soul to the
miseries from which it had struggled to escape. It would be a waste of
words, for Norris would never understand. Would Marion? Cold terror
seized him at the thought of the coming, the inevitable scene with
her. She, he realized vaguely, was different from--from all the others
he had ever seen and looked down upon from his safe heights of cynical
hatred and contempt. She was not selfish or mercenary--not consciously
selfish or mercenary. And she was not vile. But she was all the more
dangerous because her heart was pure. She was too high-bred, too fine,
to demand payment of his debt; but her very reticence and delicacy, he
foresaw, would make his repudiation of that debt--that factitious
debt--more difficult. Twice or thrice, as he struggled with his
problem, he was conscious of a curious, disturbing thrill. She loved
him. There had been a time, long, long ago--But now he was a man; he
had learned his lesson; and he knew that the chains would be no less
hateful because they were made of gold.

There came a day when he sat, wrapped in blankets, in an armchair near
the window, where he could see the grass waving in the sunlight on the
slope above the cottage, and the pines bending in the breeze high up
the hill. Marion, near him, her hands folded in her lap, looked
sometimes out of the window but more often at him, though his eyes
avoided hers. She was scarcely less pale than he, and very tired and
worn. Despite Hillyer's protestations she had slept little in the ten
days of Philip's peril; for she would trust no one but herself to do
with iron determination exactly what the doctor had commanded.
Philip's pitiable pleadin