"But you _must_, Gard, you _must_ stay." So tiny a torch to shake with such insistence at the wide night and call on its hurrying storms to stop! Enter demurral and private petition to those high courts and abstract legislatures! "The constitution does not provide for you in person." "Then amend it. It should. It does me wrong. What are laws for if not for justice?" "They are not at the call of human justice." "Ah, then, not justice! But have pity, or forget and go by! Only let me keep him. I love him. I will not let him go." The protest seems almost as persistent as the law. After all, it might be itself a law or an amendment in process of making, this protest. But if Gard Windham should not go on that adventure and exploration, inferred by Mavering to be, perhaps, Arctic in character, and should linger back to life in the course of event and not by virtue of an amendment, probably Helen would not care how it came about. She did not care how the men with the stretcher looked, how they took off their caps or whispered. The moving train and the steamboat were vague things aside. Both were crowded, but no one spoke to her. It seemed to be arranged, recognized, and admitted. A group gathered about Mavering on deck, who said: "Why, it appears to me a situation that doesn't admit of remark. It looks like a case of stand off and clear the road. It has that distinguished appearance." And there was a murmur of assent. The wounded, sitting or lying about on both decks and in the cabin, were wretched and sinister sights. Some babbled in delirium; a few, like Gard, were sunk in torpor, unconscious of their issues. The steamer ploughed through splashing and gurgling water. The driven, wintry clouds streamed across the sky, gray and ragged as battle-torn banners. Hawks floated over the river, graceful in their savage hunt over the double-decked steamer loaded with human pain bound for the hospitals. And Helen noticed and remembered nothing of it. She seemed to herself more like a ghost alone with Gard, who was another ghost. Empty space was around them, the existence of both so tenuous that it consisted only of the faint pulse-beat in his wrist, which she held. This beat was the measure of the flight of time, and the slender thread that bound the world together. It used to seem to her that Gard was too intangible, almost unreal. One could not say what he was like. What did he mean by: "I don't care whether I'm an admirable person or not; I'm a partially illuminated point, floating along I don't know where or why. What's the use of caring? There's too much before and after?" Or: "Every one lives in a dungeon; he doesn't know any other dungeon than his own?" And when he used to play the organ in Saint Mary's and fill the great church with mystical voices, he had seemed to her something not of the daily world, but of a world partly like the one in which she built her own fanciful castles; only it was wider and more peculiar, and the powers in