They were on the main road now, walking so swiftly that, in the hot summer night, Sylvia felt her forehead beaded and her light dress cling to her moist body.  She took her father’s hand.  It was parched like a sick man’s, the skin like a dry husk.  After this, they walked hand-in-hand.  Professor Marshall continued to walk rapidly, scuffling in his loose, unlaced shoes.  They passed barns and farmhouses, the latter sleeping, black in the starlight, with darkened windows.  In one, a poor little shack of two rooms, there was a lighted pane, and as they passed, Sylvia heard the sick wail of a little child.  The sound pierced her heart.  She longed to go in and put her arms about the mother.  Now she understood.  She tightened her hold on her father’s hand and lifted it to her lips.

He suffered this with no appearance of his former anger, and soon after Sylvia was aware that his gait was slackening.  She looked at him searchingly, and saw that he had swung from unnatural tension to spent exhaustion.  His head was hanging and as he walked he wavered.  She put her hand under his elbow and turned him about on the road.  “Now we will go home,” she said, drawing his arm through hers.  He made no resistance, not seeming to know what she had done, and shuffled along wearily, leaning all his weight on her arm.  She braced herself against this drag, and led him slowly back, wiping her face from time to time with her sleeve.  There were moments when she thought she must let him sink on the road, but she fought through these, and as the sky was turning faintly gray over their heads, and the implacably silent stars were disappearing in this pale light, the two stumbled up the walk to the porch.

Professor Marshall let himself be lowered into the steamer chair.  Sylvia stood by him until she was sure he would not stir, and then hurried into the kitchen.  In a few moments she brought him a cup of hot coffee and a piece of bread.  He drank the one and ate the other without protest She set the tray down and put a pillow under her father’s head, raising the foot-rest.  He did not resist her.  His head fell back on the pillow, but his eyes did not close.  They were fixed on a distant point in the sky.

Sylvia tiptoed away into the house and sank down shivering into a chair.  A great fit of trembling and nausea came over her.  She rose, walked into the kitchen, her footsteps sounding in her ears like her mother’s.  There was some coffee left, which she drank resolutely, and she cooked an egg and forced it down, her mother’s precepts loud in her ears.  Whatever else happened, she must have her body in condition to be of use.

After this she went out to the porch again and lay down in the hammock near her father.  The dawn had brightened into gold, and the sun was showing on the distant, level, green horizon-line.

* * * * *

It was almost the first moment of physical relaxation she had known, and to her immense, her awed astonishment it was instantly filled with a pure, clear brilliance, the knowledge that Austin Page lived and loved her.  It was the first, it was the only time she thought of anything but her father, and this was not a thought, it was a vision.  In the chaos about her, a great sunlit rock had emerged.  She laid hold on it and knew that she would not sink.