"Not that it would make any difference if they _could_ touch me," he continued, with a proud motion of his tired head. "It's purely a question of feeling--it's a question of right within a right, Mary. It's to do what is really kind by these people-- Why, Mary, if you could have seen it! From beginning to end it was the most beautiful, the most wonderful thing. Nothing of the kind ever happened to me before. Mary, if an angel from the throne of God had done it--they couldn't have felt--they couldn't have treated me--it was enough to make a fellow a better man the rest of his days. Why, it was worth _living_ for, I tell you! ... And now to let them know..." Hurlburt Chester was very tired, as we say. He choked, and hid his pale face in his pillow. And his wife laid hers beside it and cried--as women do--without pretending that she didn't. But the baby laughed aloud. And then there drove through the father's mind the repeated phrase which followed the race of the "Roarer" all the way from Beverly to Annisquam: "What if it were Bert?" Chester's head whirled yet from the fatigue and jar of the trip, and the words seemed to take leaps through his brain as the car leaped when she was at the top of her great speed. So he kissed the child, and dashed a drop from his cheek quite openly--since only Mary saw. A constraint unusual to their candid relations breathed like a fog between the husband and the wife; indeed, it did not lift altogether as the autumn opened and closed. Chester's visits to Annisquam (in which she once or twice accompanied him) were many and merciful; and the distinguished surgeon took the responsibility of the case till the boy was quite convalescent. The lad recovered slowly, but St. Clair promised that the cure would be complete. The touching gratitude of Jacob Dryver amounted to an idealization such as the comfortable, undramatic life of Chester had never experienced. He seemed to swim in it as an imaginative person dreams of swimming in the air, tree-high above the heads of the crowd on the earth. The situation had become to him a fine intoxicant--but it had its reactions, as intoxicants must. September and October burned to ashes upon the North Shore. Fire of maple, flash of sumac, torch of elder, flare of ivy, faded into brown November, and the breakers off the Beverly coast took on the greens and blues of north-wind weather below the line of silver surf. The Chesters closed "their own hired house" and moved to town. The Aurora remained in her stable, nor had she left it since the morning when she came wearily back from Annisquam. His wife had noticed, but had not seemed to notice, that Chester rode no more that fall. She noted too, but did not seem to note, that he continued his visits to the injured lad after they had returned to the city.