The voice trailed away, and presently he was asleep or unconscious again, I couldn’t be sure which. Neither could I be sure whether he believed this version of the tale or whether he concocted it to comfort me. At any rate, it served its purpose in that it eased the situation outwardly, enabling Cantyre and me to face each other without too much self-consciousness. As a matter of fact, self-consciousness had hardly embarrassed us through the night. There had been too much to think about and to do. The minute I had got Lovey into the living-room and on the couch I had run for Cantyre, and he had run back with me. In the stress of watching the old man’s struggle between life and death we felt toward our personal relations what one feels of an exciting play after returning to realities. We were back on the old terms; we called each other Stephen and Frank. Only now and then, when for a half-hour there was nothing to do but to sit by the bed and watch, did our minds revert to the actual between us. That is, mine reverted to it, and I suppose his did the same. How he thought of it I cannot tell you; but to me it seemed infinitely trifling. Here was a dying man whose half-lighted spirit was standing on the threshold of a fully lighted world. One might have said that the radiance of the life on which he was entering already shone in the tenderness that began to dawn in the delicate old face. It was a face growing younger, as for two or three years it had grown more spiritual. I saw that now and did justice to it as something big. It was on the level of big things; and love-affairs between men and women were only on the level of the small. And all over the world big things of the same sort were taking place, some in the sharp flash of an instant, and some as the slow result of years. I had seen so much of it with my own eyes that I could call up vision after vision as I sat alone in the gray morning, watching the soft, sweet pall settle on the old man’s countenance, while Cantyre took his bath. Queerly, out of the unrecorded, or out of what I didn’t suppose I had recorded, there flashed a succession of pictures, all of them of the big, the splendid, the worth while. They came inconsequently, without connection with each other, without connection that I could see with the moment I was living through, beyond the fact that they were all on the scale of the big. There was the recollection of a khaki-clad figure lying face downward on a hillside. I approached him from below, catching sight first of the soles of the huge boots on which he would never walk again. Coming nearer, I saw his arms outstretched above his head and his nails dug into the earth. He was bleeding from the ears. But when I bent over him to see if he was still alive he said, almost roughly: “Leave me alone! I can get along all right. Jephson’s over there.”