Diana was still very ill. They found it necessary to keep her perfectly quiet. The old wound, never fully healed, had given her much pain of late. Mental excitement at the picnic and her fall had produced feverish symptoms. Her physician had fears which he hardly ventured to express; which he hardly dared formulate, even to himself. She had aroused herself enough during the day to send a kind message by Clara to Dunstan, and to ask that they would write to Miss Sullivan to come on. A letter to that lady would go by the morning mail to Boston. Dunstan was in an agony of suspense. During the day, he tried to distract his fixed madness of thought by training Pallid over the beach. The other men were also out on the beach or the road. Bets were nearly even on Pallid, Knockknees, and Nosegay. Toward evening, Dunstan mounted his own horse and galloped off up the island. The wild sunset and windy drift of torn, black clouds was such a mood of nature as suited the terror at his heart. It was a night like this when, in Texas, he had started from San Antonio to ride sixty miles across the country and catch his train. There were such stormy masses of weird clouds, so flashed through by an August moon, so floating at midnight, when, as he dashed along the trail, shouting in savage exhilaration, all the wildness of his nature bursting forth in mad songs and chants of Indian war, suddenly his trusty horse, who had borne him thousands of miles in safety by night and day, over deserts of dust and wastes of snow, fell with him, on him, crushing him terribly. And then, by just such fitful gleams of moonlight, he had dragged himself desolately along, with unbroken limbs, but mangled and bleeding--dragged himself whither he saw a midnight lamp, as of one who watched the sick or the dead. And near the spot whence the light came, he had sunk voiceless, fainting, dying, until he was awakened by a tender touch upon his brow, and saw bending over him, in the clear quiet of midnight, Diana, who had found at last and was to save her Endymion: Diana, from that moment to become the passion of his every instinct, the love of every thought. But now, now it was she who was the wounded, the fainted, the dying. O God! he could not think of this despair, and he cried aloud and galloped on furiously. The drift of wild black clouds followed him as he rode and met him more gloomily as he returned.