The two physicians were talking in low tones in the little garden behind the store when Jethro came out of the doorway. “He looks as if he were suffering too,” said the Boston physician, and he walked toward Jethro and laid a hand upon his shoulders. “I give him until winter, my friend,” said Dr. Coles. Jethro Bass sat down on the doorstep--on that same millstone where he had talked with Cynthia many years before--and was silent for a long while. The doctor was used to scenes of sorrow, but the sight of this man's suffering unnerved him, and he turned from it. “D-doctor?” said Jethro, at last. The doctor turned again: “Yes?” he said. “D-doctor--if Wetherell hadn't b'en to the capital would he have lived--if he hadn't been to the capital?” “My friend,” said Dr. Coles, “if Mr. Wetherell had always lived in a warm house, and had always been well fed, and helped over the rough places and shielded from the storms, he might have lived longer. It is a marvel to me that he has lived so long.” And then the doctor went way, back to Boston. Many times in his long professional life had the veil been lifted for him--a little. But as he sat in the train he said to himself that in this visit to the hamlet of Coniston he had had the strangest glimpse of all. William Wetherell rallied, as Dr. Coles had predicted, from that first sharp attack, and one morning they brought up a reclining chair which belonged to Mr. Satterlee, the minister, and set it in the window. There, in the still days of the early autumn, Wetherell looked down upon the garden he had grown to love, and listened to the song of Coniston Water. There Cynthia, who had scarcely left his side, read to him from Keats and Shelley and Tennyson--yet the thought grew on her that he did not seem to hear. Even that wonderful passage of Milton's, beginning “So sinks the day-star in the ocean bed,” which he always used to beg her to repeat, did not seem to move him now. The neighbors came and sat with him, but he would not often speak. Cheery Lem Hallowell and his wife, and Cousin Ephraim, to talk about the war, hobbling slowly up the stairs--for rheumatism had been added to that trouble of the Wilderness bullet now, and Ephraim was getting along in years; and Rias Richardson stole up in his carpet slippers; and Moses, after his chores were done, and Amandy with her cakes and delicacies, which he left untouched--though Amandy never knew it. Yes, and Jethro came. Day by day he would come silently into the room, and sit silently for a space, and go as silently out of it. The farms were neglected now on Thousand Acre Hill. William Wetherell would take his hand, and speak to him, but do no more than that.