Her look changed, and she smiled sadly, as though resigned, a second person seeming to enter in upon her dream. “Ananias, it shall be as you desire.… If thou’lt rest content with friendship for a time, perchance in the coming days I’ll learn to love thee, cousin, but now I cannot.… My father alone is in my heart.” She broke off abruptly and grasped Vytal’s hand, as though upon that grasp depended her salvation from a fate far worse than death. Evidently behind all the foremost people of her delirium a dominant personality influenced her mind—the same personality, perhaps, whose thrall had in some strange way drawn her to the cabin. And now she fell to sobbing, sobbing in anguish, and her helplessly childlike expression tortured Vytal’s soul. “Oh, Ananias, I knew not of this great weakness.… I reck’d not against thy love of wine … God pity me.…” Then for long she lay moaning and whispering inarticulately, Vytal kneeling beside her, scarcely more conscious than herself. The wind, subsiding, wailed about the cabin, leaving the torchlight steadier within. The damp earth, as yet unfloored, lent to the room a tomblike chill, and leaves rustled across the rafters. Eleanor, turning restlessly, gazed into a dark corner, as if yet another figure had defined itself amid all the complexity of fevered thought. “Margery, I must tell thee,” she said, with the impassivity of one who has no interest in life. “I am with child.” Then again all was silent save for the low moan and whisper of the wind as it died slowly in the forest. Vytal rose and went to the door, acutely realizing that to remain longer beside the bed and hear these words of a breaking heart was not only to torture himself, but to profane the soul that, all unknowing, gave them utterance. “John Vytal, I love thee … thee only … always.” He trembled, then mechanically opened the door, passed out, and, closing it again, stood outside before it, fixed and rigid like a sentinel on duty. Only incoherent phrases came to him now, inarticulate and meaningless in language, yet fraught with so terrible a significance that he strove to force upon his mind a condition utterly devoid of thought. But with Vytal this was ever impossible, and so at the last, with a great mental effort, he clutched at the consideration of outward and practical necessity. Would Marlowe never return with aid? He listened desperately for footsteps. Every slight rustle, every sound of wind and wood that came instead, filled his ears and brain, until all the world and existence seemed but a medley of sounds, trivial, but wonderfully important; low, but always audible and intently to be heeded in the night. When at last he heard a footfall he realized dimly that this was not what he had expected; it was not from the woods, but from within the hut.