“Yes.  I could have done it easily.”

“Why, then, didn’t you?”

“It was for Diane’s sake.  I’m afraid I didn’t think of you.  I had put you out of my mind.”

“Well, if a man can be noble at the same time he’s terrible, you’ve been, Russ—­I don’t know how I feel.  I’m sick and I can’t think.  I see, though, what you saved Diane and Steele.  Why, she’s touching happiness again, fearfully, yet really.  Think of that!  God only knows what you did for Steele.  If I judged it by his suffering as you lay there about to die it would be beyond words to tell.  But, Russ, you’re pale and shaky now.  Hush!  No more talk!”

With all my eyes and mind and heart and soul I watched to see if she shrank from me.  She was passive, yet tender as she smoothed my pillow and moved my head.  A dark abstraction hung over her, and it was so strange, so foreign to her nature.  No sensitiveness on earth could have equaled mine at that moment.  And I saw and felt and knew that she did not shrink from me.  Thought and feeling escaped me for a while.  I dozed.  The old shadows floated to and fro.

When I awoke Steele and Diane had just come in.  As he bent over me I looked up into his keen gray eyes and there was no mask on my own as I looked up to him.

“Son, the thing that was needed was a change of nurses,” he said gently.  “I intend to make up some sleep now and leave you in better care.”

From that hour I improved.  I slept, I lay quietly awake, I partook of nourishing food.  I listened and watched, and all the time I gained.  But I spoke very little, and though I tried to brighten when Steele was in the room I made only indifferent success of it.  Days passed.  Sally was almost always with me, yet seldom alone.  She was grave where once she had been gay.  How I watched her face, praying for that shade to lift!  How I listened for a note of the old music in her voice!  Sally Langdon had sustained a shock to her soul almost as dangerous as had been the blow at my life.  Still I hoped.  I had seen other women’s deadened and darkened spirits rebound and glow once more.  It began to dawn upon me, however, that more than time was imperative if she were ever to become her old self again.

Studying her closer, with less thought of myself and her reaction to my presence, I discovered that she trembled at shadows, seemed like a frightened deer with a step always on its trail, was afraid of the dark.  Then I wondered why I had not long before divined one cause of her strangeness.  The house where I had killed one of her kin would ever be haunted for her.  She had said she was a Southerner and that blood was thick.  When I had thought out the matter a little further, I deliberately sat up in bed, scaring the wits out of all my kind nurses.

“Steele, I’ll never get well in this house.  I want to go home.  When can you take me?”