“Tell that to the Sabbath fire-woman! Why hast thou not come? Is it so very much to spare me an hour or two a week? If I could go out like some of the patients, I would come to thee. But I have tired thee out utterly----” “No, no, Sarah,” he murmured uneasily. “Then why----” He was covered with shame and confusion. His face was turned away. “I did not like to come,” he said desperately. “Why not?” Crimson patches came and went on the white cheeks; her heart beat madly. “Surely thou canst understand?” “Understand what? I speak of green and thou answerest of blue.” “I answer as thou askest.” “Thou answerest not at all.” “No answer is also an answer,” he snarled, driven to bay. “Thou understandest well enough. Thyself saidst it was public talk.” “Ah-h-h!” in a stifled shriek of despair. Her intuition divined everything. The shadowy, sinister suggestions she had so long beat back by force of will took form and substance. Her head fell back on the pillow, the eyes closed. He stayed on, bending awkwardly over her. “So sick! So sick! So sick!” moaned the grandmother. “Thou sayest they have compassion on thee in their talk,” he murmured at last, half deprecatingly, half resentfully. “Have they none on me?” Her silence chilled him. “But thou hast compassion, Sarah,” he urged. “Thou understandest.” Presently she reopened her eyes. “Thou art not gone?” she murmured. “No; thou seest I am not tired of thee, Sarah, my life. Only----” “Wilt thou wash my skin and not make me wet?” she interrupted bitterly. “Go home. Go home to her!” “I will not go home.” “Then go under like Korah.” He shuffled out. That night her lonely hell was made lonelier by the opening of a peephole into paradise--a paradise of Adam and Eve and forbidden fruit. For days she preserved a stony silence toward the sympathy of the inmates. Of what avail words against the flames of jealousy in which she writhed? He lingered about the passage on the next visiting day, vaguely remorseful; but she would not see him. So he went away sulkily indignant, and his new housemate comforted him, and he came no more. When you lie on your back all day and all night, you have time to think, especially if you do not sleep. A situation presents itself in many lights from dawn to dusk, and from dusk to dawn. One such light flashed on the paradise and showed it to her as but the portico of purgatory. Her husband would be damned in the next world, even as she was in this. His soul would be cut off from among its people. On this thought she brooded till it loomed horribly in her darkness. And at last she dictated a letter to the matron, asking Herzel to come and see her. He obeyed, and stood shame-faced at her side, fidgeting with his peaked cap. Her hard face softened momentarily at the sight of him, her bosom heaved, suppressed sobs swelled her throat. [Illustration] “Thou hast sent for me?” he murmured.