The men lifted him to a closed carriage. Charter was driven to a sanatorium. One of the friends undertook to stay with him for a day or two. Charter did not rightly realize where he was until evening. He appeared to take the news very quietly. Whiskey was allowed him when it was needed. Other patients in various states of convalescence offered assistance in many ways. That night, when the friend finally fell asleep in the chair at the bedside, Charter arose softly, went into a hall, _where a light was burning_, and plunged down into the dark--twenty-two brass-covered steps. His head broke the panel of the front door at the foot. His idea was the same which had made him hunt for his six-shooter the morning before. Besides the door, he broke his nose, his arm, and covered himself with bruises, but fell short, years yet unnumbered, from his intent. Under the care of experts after that, he was watched constantly, and given stimulus at gradually lengthening intervals--until he refused it himself on the seventh day. Three weeks later, still, he left the place, a man again, with one hundred and twenty needle punctures in the flesh of his unbroken arm. FOURTEENTH CHAPTER THE SINGING OF THE SKYLARK CEASES ABRUPTLY; CHARTER HASTENS EAST TO FIND A QUEER MESSAGE AT _THE GRANVILLE_ Charter, three years after the foregoing descent into realism, was confessedly as happy a man as the Mid-West held. He accepted his serenity with a full knowledge of its excellence, and according to his present health and habits would not have been excited to find himself still among those present, had the curtain been lifted thirty or forty years away. In the year that followed the sanatorium experience, Charter in reality found himself. There were a few months in which work came slowly and was uncertain in quality. In his entire conception, nothing worse could happen than an abatement of mental activity, but he did not writhe, knowing that he richly deserved the perfect punishment. So slowly and deeply did physical care and spiritual awakening restore the forces of mind, however, that he did not realize an expansion of power until his first long work had received critical and popular acclaim, and he could see it, himself, in perspective. So he put off the last and toughest shackle of King Fear--the living death.