A few days later as he sat by her bedside, Cartice edged herself nearer, and laying one of her slender hands on his, said, “I am grateful to you, doctor, very grateful for helping me so much.” The words were commonplace enough, but there were the eyes, the wonderful eyes, with their strange power to melt the heart, gazing into his. The doctor’s soul was shaken, he knew not why. “I don’t understand it,” he mused as he left the house. “What was it that came out of her eyes and unnerved me in a flash, making me want to cry like a baby.” At the memory of that look, in which the mask of pride fell off and the suffering spirit revealed its anguish, the tears rushed anew to his eyes. “No, I don’t understand it,” he repeated, “but if I had been performing a surgical operation of the most delicate and dangerous kind, and she had looked at me that way, I am afraid I should have dropped the knife. What was that indefinable thing I saw in her eyes? What was it? If anguish can accumulate for ages and ages and then look out through a pair of eyes, it was that.” Days of convalescence came, bringing the despondency, gloom and sometimes despair that attack those who have retreated from the edge of the grave before they are quite out of sight of it. Cartice sat by her window with the breeze blowing over her, and it seemed that a thousand years had passed since last she saw the spring. Watching the people on the street, hurrying hither and yon, she envied them their strength, their activity, aims and interests. Idle and purposeless, weary and hopeless, she sat wondering what she was to do with the rest of her life. By nature she was an outdoor child, who loved field and forest and brook and hill. The hateful brick walls that stared at her now fatigued her eyes and depressed her spirit. When funeral processions went by she wondered what mystery the narrow black box represented. Sable and solemn and dreadful as it all was she envied those who rode in the long black wagon of death. “At least they are out of this horror,” she said. “If there be another life its conditions cannot be worse than they are here. If there be nothing on the other side of death’s silence, then the problem is very simple.” This great problem at the end of life always interested her more than all those to be solved on the journey. If death be an open door to larger activities and happier conditions, then we should bear with courage whatever comes upon us here, and go smiling on, indifferent to pain and disappointment; but if all our striving and longing, sorrowing and suffering and loving reach a finality in the grave, then--no words are strong enough and bitter enough to tell the tragic story of the cheat. Cartice had always marveled that many could see their nearest and dearest pass into that dread silence, and yet put the thought of what it is out of their minds, and go on pursuing their foolish little pleasures exactly as though the riddle was not for them also to solve.