e, there
are some others who'd be glad to come, and don't dare. There are also
some others who would be glad to come, and who probably would kill you,
if they did. Still, granted the solitary dozen: force isn't a thing one
measures by the acre, Reed. It is deep, not wide. Therefore your dozen
are enough."

"But why the dozen? They come to play with me. I don't do anything to
them."

"No?" Whittenden spoke with his eyes on his cigar. "Ask Ramsdell. Ask
Brenton. Ask--" he turned his eyes on Opdyke; "Miss Keltridge."

With a sudden gesture, Opdyke flung his arm across his brow and eyes.

"Don't!" he said, and his voice sounded stifled.

Deliberately his friend bent forward, took away the shielding arm, and
looked down into Opdyke's eyes unflinchingly.

"Reed, you must not let yourself get morbid," he said steadily. "God
knows there's every reason that you should; and yet, once you do, the
game is up. This is a thing you must face squarely, and remember, while
you face it, that not one life is concerned, but two." Then he let go
the arm, which went back to the old position, and, for a time, the room
was very still.

"Old man," Whittenden said, after a longish interval of smoking and
watching the shielded face; "I know I'm not much use; but doesn't it
help a little to know I'm here, and sick with the seeing for myself all
that this thing means to you? Of course, I had the letters; but they
didn't go far. One has to come and talk it out; and--Well, I'm here."

Then the arm came down, and the heavy eyes met Whittenden's.

"That's why I sent for you," Reed said. "I wanted you."

Ramsdell, in the next room, had quite a little doze, before once more
the voices waked him.

"You see," Reed said at last, as if there had been no pause at all; "I
was a little in the state those fellows were in, up at the mine. I
needed something equivalent to their extreme unction. The cases are
analogous; though, after all, I am not sure it would be quite as hard
to die into the next world as I'm finding it to die out of this."

Whittenden's clear eyes flickered. Then he braced himself and asked the
direct question to which his friend, for two long hours, had been so
plainly leading.

"Reed, do you mean this thing is--permanent?"

"Yes."

"You know it for a fact?"

"Yes."

"Since when?"

"A month or so."

"They told you?"

"No. They still keep up the fiction that they can't predict anything
with any surety."

"Then how d