He looked up with a start to find the doctor once more in the room. He rose. "Doc," he asked in a strained whisper, "Doc, will it be all right?" He wet his lips. "Will she live?" "You needn't whisper," the other told him; "she doesn't know ... now. 'Will she live?' I can only tell you that she wanted to die a thousand times." Gordon turned away, looking out through the window. It gave upon the slope planted with corn; the vivid, green shoots everywhere pushed through the chocolate-colored soil; chickens were vigorously scratching in a corner. The shadow of the west range reached down and enfolded the Makimmon dwelling; the sky burned in a sulphur-yellow flame. When he turned the doctor had vanished, the room had grown dusky. He resumed his seat. "I didn't do right," he acknowledged to the travesty on the bed; "there was a good bit I didn't get the hang of. It seems like I hadn't learned anything at all from being alive. I'm going to fix it up," he proceeded, painfully earnest. "I'm--" He broke off suddenly at the stabbing memory of the doctor's words, "She wanted to die a thousand times." He thought, I've killed her a thousand times already. The fear plucked at his throat. He rose and walked unsteadily to the door and out upon the porch. The evening drew its gauze over the valley, the shrill, tenuous chorus of insects had begun for the night, the gold caps were dissolving from the eastern peaks. He saw Simeon Caley at the stable door; Sim avoided him, moving behind a corner of the shed. His pending sense of blood-guiltiness deepened. The impulse returned to flee, to vanish in the engulfing wild of the mountains. But he realized vaguely that that from which he longed to escape lay within him, he would carry it--the memories woven inexplicably of past and present, dominated by this last, unforgettable specter on the bed--into the woods, the high, lonely clearings, the still valleys. It was not remorse now, it was not simple fear, but the old oppression, increased a thousand-fold. He sat in the low rocking chair that had held his mother and Clare, and, only yesterday, Lettice, and its rockers made their familiar tracking sound over the uneven boards of the porch. At this hour there was usually a stir and smell of cooking from the kitchen; but now the kitchen window was blank and still. Darkness gathered slowly about him; it obscured the black and white check, the red thread, of his suit; it flowed in about him and reduced him to the common greyness of the porch, the sod, the stream. It changed him from a man with a puzzled, seamed visage into a man with no especial, perceptible features, and then into a shadow, an inconsequential blur less important than the supports for the wooden covering above. XXI