licia, scandalized. "Why, you haven't even
_asked_ me! Whoever in this world heard of buying a girl's ring
before she's said 'Yes'?"

"Alicia," said Doctor Richard Geddes, "I'm your Man, and you know
it. And you're my Girl, and I know it. Here, let's see if this thing
fits."

Meekly Alicia, the impudent, the flirt, held out her slim hand.

"That's settled, thank God!" said the doctor. And he swept her
clear off her feet, and kissed her with thoroughness and enthusiasm.

"Richard! People are coming! They'll see you!"

"Let 'em!"

I sat there quietly, and stared at the two of them with a sort of
vacant watchfulness. My hat was gone, my hairpins had taken unto
themselves wings, and my hair, covered with dust, hung about me like
a veil. I was just beginning to be conscious of pain. It was a
shuddering pain, new and cruel, and I winced. The next minute Alicia
was kneeling beside me, and her face had again become quite
colorless.

"Sophy!" her voice sounded shrill and far off. "Sophy, you said you
were all right!--Richard, look at Sophy!"

I felt the doctor's swift, deft hands upon me. And more pain. People
were arriving now. Cars stopped, and excited men and women
surrounded us. One tall figure leaped from the first car and reached
us ahead of all others.

"Geddes!" cried a voice. "Thank God, Geddes! We were told you'd been
killed outright! Alicia all right, too?" Then: "Sophy!" This time it
was a cry of terror. "Never tell me it's Sophy!"

I saw his face bent over me. Then a red mist came, and then
everything went dark.

CHAPTER XIX

DEEP WATERS

Somewhere, far, far off, a faint and feeble little light glimmered,
one small point of light in vast blackness. In the whole universe
there wasn't anything or anybody but just that tiny light, and swift
black water, and drowning me. Something deep within me--I think
occultists call it the body-spirit--was clamoring frantically to
hold fast to the light, because if that went under I should go
under, too. I tried to keep my eyes upon the trembling spark.

Whereupon the light changed to a sound, the monotonous insistence of
which forced me to be worriedly aware of it. It was--why, it was a
voice, calling, over and over and over again, "_Sophy! Sophy!_"

Somebody was calling _me_. With an immense effort I managed to raise
my eyelids. I was lying in a bed, and caught a drowsy, fleeting
glimpse of four posts.

Four posts upon my bed,
Fo