“You knew Mrs. Ormond, too, I believe,” the psychologist pursued. I owned that I used to go to the Ormonds’ house. “Then you know what a type she was, I suppose,” he turned to the others, “and as they’re both dead it’s no contravention of the club etiquette against talking of women, to speak of her. I can’t very well give the instance--the sign--that Rulledge is seeking without speaking of her, unless I use a great deal of circumlocution.” We all urged him to go on, and he went on. “I had the facts I’m going to give, from Mrs. Ormond. You know that the Ormonds left New York a couple of years ago?” He happened to look at Minver as he spoke, and Minver answered: “No; I must confess that I didn’t even know they had left the planet.” Wanhope ignored his irrelevant ignorance. “They went to live provisionally at a place up the Housatonic road, somewhere--perhaps Canaan; but it doesn’t matter. Ormond had been suffering some time with an obscure affection of the heart--” “Oh, come now!” said Rulledge. “You’re not going to spring anything so pat as heart-disease on us?” “Acton is all ears,” said Minver, nodding toward me. “He hears the weird note afar.” The psychologist smiled. “I’m afraid you’re not interested. I’m not much interested myself in these unrelated instances.” “Oh, no!” “Don’t!” “Do go on!” the different entreaties came, and after a little time taken to recover his lost equanimity, Wanhope went on: “I don’t know whether you knew that Ormond had rather a peculiar dread of death.” We none of us could affirm that we did, and again Wanhope resumed: “I shouldn’t say that he was a coward above other men I believe he was rather below the average in cowardice. But the thought of death weighed upon him. You find this much more commonly among the Russians, if we are to believe their novelists, than among Americans. He might have been a character out of one of Tourguénief’s books, the idea of death was so constantly present with him. He once told me that the fear of it was a part of his earliest consciousness, before the time when he could have had any intellectual conception of it. It seemed to be something like the projection of an alien horror into his life--a prenatal influence--” “Jove!” Rulledge broke in. “I don’t see how the women stand it. To look forward nearly a whole year to death as the possible end of all they’re hoping for and suffering for! Talk of men’s courage after that! I wonder we’re not _all_ marked.’ “I never heard of anything of the kind in Ormond’s history,” said Wanhope, tolerant of the incursion. Minver took his cigar out to ask, the more impressively, perhaps, “What do you fellows make of the terror that a two months’ babe starts in its sleep with before it can have any notion of what fear is on its own hook?” “We don’t make anything of it,” the psychologist answered. “Perhaps the pathologists do.” “Oh, it’s easy enough to say wind,” Rulledge indignantly protested.