"Even with them all against me, Tom, I've stuck to it--to what I feel is my right. This is my home--and it's Jim's home--and the children's as well as it's mine--and, in a way, it's--inviolate. I've sworn that nothing ugly shall come into it--nothing shall ruin it--the way our lives were ruined out there!" Her voice trembled, but her eyes, as she turned to me at the last, were steady. "I'll send something, of course," she said; "you will take it to them. But I'll--not go." With her message and her money I sought out Lin Darton and Miss Etta, and together we rambled in their open Ford along those flat, dead Illinois roads that I had not seen for so long. It is a doctor's profession to save life, and there was a life to be saved, if it were possible. But he was nearer to the end than I had thought. Grega was there in that same barren room of the mill-house, doing things in a stolid, undeft sort of way. The bed had been pulled near the stove and the room was stuffier, more untidy than in the days when Lisbeth had been there. The creaky bed, the unvarnished walls, and the rusty alarm clock, that ticked insistently, all added to the sense of flaccidity. The afternoon was late and already dark; sagging clouds had gathered, shutting out what was left of the daylight. Miss Etta lit a smudgy lamp, sniffling as she did so. From under the torn quilt the man stared back at me, with much of his old penetration, despite the fever that racked him. "I--want--Lisbeth," were his first words to me. I shook my head. "She cannot come just now," I told him, hand on his wrist. "But we are here to do everything for you." "Tel-e-phone her," he said with his old emphasis on each syllable, "and tell--her that I'm--dy-ing. Don't answer me. You know that--_I--am dy-ing and I--want--her_." Miss Etta, the tears streaming over her large face, went to do his bidding. I could hear her lumbersome footsteps going down the crazy outside stairway. He gave me a triumphant look as I lifted his arm, then abruptly he drew away from me. He had an ingrained fear of drugs of any sort. There was no gainsaying his fierce refusals, so I made him as comfortable as I could while we waited. The end was very near. His face, thin almost to emaciation, was flushed to a deep, feverish red, but his lips took on a more unbending line than ever and his eyes burned like bits of phosphorescence in the semidarkness. For an hour he lay there motionless with only the shadow of a smile touching his lips at intervals.