There were times when Cynthia leaned over him, listening as he breathed to know whether he slept or were awake. If he were not sleeping, he would speak her name: he repeated it often in those days, as though the sound of it gave him comfort; and he would fall asleep with it on his lips, holding her hand, and thinking, perhaps, of that other Cynthia who had tended and nursed and shielded him in other days. Then she would steal down the stairs to Jethro on the doorstep: to Jethro who would sit there for hours at a time, to the wonder and awe of his neighbors. Although they knew that he loved the storekeeper as he loved no other man, his was a grief that they could not understand. Cynthia used to go to Jethro in the garden. Sorrow had brought them very near together; and though she had loved him before, now he had become her reliance and her refuge. The first time Cynthia saw him; when the worst of the illness had passed and the strange and terrifying apathy had come, she had hidden her head on his shoulder and wept there. Jethro kept that coat, with the tear stains on it, to his dying day, and never wore it again. "Sometimes--sometimes I think if he hadn't gone to the capital, Cynthy, this mightn't hev come," he said to her once. "But the doctor said that didn't matter, Uncle Jethro," she answered, trying to comfort him. She, too, believed that something had happened at the capital. "N-never spoke to you about anything there--n-never spoke to you, Cynthia?" "No, never," she said. "He--he hardly speaks at all, Uncle Jethro." One bright morning after the sun had driven away the frost, when the sumacs and maples beside Coniston Water were aflame with red, Bias Richardson came stealing up the stairs and whispered something to Cynthia. "Dad," she said, laying down her book, "it's Mr. Merrill. Will you see him?" William Wetherell gave her a great fright. He started up from his pillows, and seized her wrist with a strength which she had not thought remained in his fingers. "Mr. Merrill!" he cried--"Mr. Merrill here!" "Yes," answered Cynthia, agitatedly, "he's downstairs--in the store." "Ask him to come up," said Wetherell, sinking back again, "ask him to come up." Cynthia, as she stood in the passage, was of two minds about it. She was thoroughly frightened, and went first to the garden to ask Jethro's advice. But Jethro, so Milly Skinner said, had gone off half an hour before, and did not know that Mr. Merrill had arrived. Cynthia went back again to her father. "Where's Mr. Merrill?" asked Wetherell. "Dad, do you think you ought to see him? He--he might excite you." "I insist upon seeing him, Cynthia."