Made at home in the lake cabin, she still felt the world rushing back from her as had the fields rushed by when she looked from the car window. And she rested in this. Affairs went on about her, plans were made, talk of the future or of the day; all went by her unheeded, save for a blurred and pleasant effect of swiftness. Outwardly she was serene, languorous, incuriously placid. Inwardly she thrilled with a luxury of inertness. She had loosed herself in the ebbing tide, and she folded her hands and smiled from this with the assured indolence of one who knows that some earned reward will not long be delayed. The slow-paced even life was a balm to her, the gathering about the table at mealtimes, the evenings in the studio, when her sister played or talked with Ewing; when she could lie still on the couch and try to make herself forgotten, regretting only the short dry cough that racked her night and morning and brought her to the minds of the others. She had thought that she could adjust herself, after a little, to the new look in Ewing's eyes, knowing as she did its secret spring. It was a look of blind acceptance, of unquestioning adoration--and mingled with it was a maddening pity. But there flashed from him, too, at times, a look of purpose and assurance, steady, secret, determined. She detected this chiefly when he glanced up to her from his drawing. He had brought with him a story to illustrate for the _Knickerbocker_, and he was, at last, to finish that series of Western scenes for the same periodical. And he had flown to this work with a frantic haste, with the look, as he bent over the board, that seemed to say: "This is for you. Be patient with me, it will soon be done." When the work did not claim him he stayed by her side, watchful for service, jealous of Virginia for little acts he might not himself perform. His eyes seldom left her, she thought, though she could not long endure their look, and she knew that he read this evasion of hers in the light of what Teevan had told him. Through all his devotion there was a gentle aloofness, a constant withdrawing, as if he knew that he must never come close. She had laughter and tears again for this when she was alone, though there were times when, in her weakness, her wild craving for the fullness of what she might not have, she would have told it all in one surrendering cry to him but for the eyes of Kitty Teevan. They were always upon her now--Ewing had hung the portrait in the studio--holding her with passionate entreaty, the mother pleading for herself in the son's memory. She could never tell him, she knew, under those eyes. She must live out her few days in content with that wondrous thing his own eyes revealed for her. She thought it comic and tragic and beautiful. One night she dreamed that she was not to die, and woke in horror of what his belief would then mean. But morning restored her serenity, and she reposed placidly again on the unquestioned sureness of her going.