I scarcely remember what other particulars he gave me at the time; my next sharp impression was of my husband lying white and breathing heavily in the bed in the Rathbone's front room, the drapery of which had been torn hastily down to make room for him, regardless of the finished pieces of Miss Harvey's trousseau still crowding the chairs upon which they had been hastily thrust. Empty sleeves hung down and vaguely seemed to reach for what they could not clasp; strangely I was aware in them of an aching lack and loss which must have sprung in my bosom. I took my husband's hand and it dropped back from my clasp, waxlike and nerveless. I think I had been kneeling by the bed for some time, talk had been going on whisperingly around me; finally the light faded and I discovered that the doctor had gone. The beribboned bridal garments hung limply still on the chairs and mocked me with their empty arms. Presently I was aware that Miss Rathbone had come in with a lamp. She stood there on the other side of the bed and we looked at him and at one another. "How long?" I asked her. "Two or three days maybe, the doctor says." "Will he know me again." "The doctor says not." "Oh, Tommy, Tommy!" I began to shake with suppressed sobbing. Miss Rathbone looked at me with cold resentment. "You can cry as much as you like, it won't disturb him," she said. She seemed to have taken the fact that she wasn't to cry herself, as final. In a few minutes old Rathbone shuffled in from the shop and stood peering at Tommy with his little red-lidded eyes, wiping them furtively. I believe the old man was fond of his partner and it was not strange to him that Tommy should be lying ill at his home. Miss Rathbone came and took him by the shoulders as one does to a grieving child and turned his face to her bosom. She was a head taller than he, and as she looked across him to me there was compulsion in her look and pleading. "He is never to know," the look said, and I looked back, "Never." It was then that I realized how genuine her affection was for the feeble, snuffling old man; she would suffer at being lessened in his eyes. Some one came and took me away for a while, and by degrees I got to know the story. It had been the night before, just about the time I was taken with that strange impulse to return, that Tommy had shut up the store and gone over to the half-furnished room belonging to the Board of Trade, which had become a sort of club for the soberer men of the community. A great deal of talk went on there which gave them the agreeable impression of something being done, though there must have been much of it of the character of that which was going on in a group around Montague when Tommy came in at the door. He came in very quietly, blinded by the light, and they had their backs to him, shaking with the loose laughter which punctuates a ribald description. Then Montague's voice took it up again.