“Yes,” said the nurse softly. “Doctor Jewett says there’s no hope. Mr. Curtain may live indefinitely, but he’ll never see again or move again or think. He’ll just breathe.” “Just breathe?” “Yes.” For the first time the nurse noted that beside the writing-desk where she remembered that she had seen a line of a dozen curious round objects she had vaguely imagined to be some exotic form of decoration, there was now only one. Where the others had been, there was now a series of little nail-holes. Harry followed her glance dazedly and then rose to his feet. “I don’t believe I’ll stay. I believe there’s a train.” She nodded. Harry picked up his hat. “Good-by,” she said pleasantly. “Good-by,” he answered, as though talking to himself and, evidently moved by some involuntary necessity, he paused on his way to the door and she saw him pluck the last object from the wall and drop it into his pocket. Then he opened the screen door and, descending the porch steps, passed out of her sight. V After a while the coat of clean white paint on the Jeffrey Curtain house made a definite compromise with the suns of many Julys and showed its good faith by turning gray. It scaled--huge peelings of very brittle old paint leaned over backward like aged men practising grotesque gymnastics and finally dropped to a moldy death in the overgrown grass beneath. The paint on the front pillars became streaky; the white ball was knocked off the left-hand door-post; the green blinds darkened, then lost all pretense of color. It began to be a house that was avoided by the tender-minded--some church bought a lot diagonally opposite for a graveyard, and this, combined with “the place where Mrs. Curtain stays with that living corpse,” was enough to throw a ghostly aura over that quarter of the road. Not that she was left alone. Men and women came to see her, met her down town, where she went to do her marketing, brought her home in their cars--and came in for a moment to talk and to rest, in the glamour that still played in her smile. But men who did not know her no longer followed her with admiring glances in the street; a diaphanous veil had come down over her beauty, destroying its vividness, yet bringing neither wrinkles nor fat. She acquired a character in the village--a group of little stories were told of her: how when the country was frozen over one winter so that no wagons nor automobiles could travel, she taught herself to skate so that she could make quick time to the grocer and druggist, and not leave Jeffrey alone for long. It was said that every night since his paralysis she slept in a small bed beside his bed, holding his hand.