She crept towards him and sat below him, coaxing him into her lap. The strange motions of her breast, as she pressed his head against her, kept the boy quiet, and in that silence she heard an inner sound--the awful pulse of the old clock beating steadily, calling her, demanding the evidence of her senses,--she who feared no ghosts,--beating out the hours of an agony she was there to witness. And she was yet in time. The hapless creature entrapped within that room dragged its weight slowly across the floor. The clock, sole witness and companion of its sufferings, ticked on impartially. Neither is this any new thing, it seemed to say. A life was starved in here before--not for lack of food, but love,--love,--love! She carried the child out into the air, and he ran before her like a breeze. The women who met them stared at her sick and desperate face. She made herself quickly understood, and as each listener drained her meaning the horror spread. There was but one man left on the place, within call, he with the boyish face and clean brown hands, who had ridden across the fields for an afternoon's idle pleasure. He stepped to her side and took the key out of her hand. “You ought not to do this,” he said gently, as their eyes met. “Wednesday, Thursday, Friday,” she counted mechanically. “He has been in there six days and seven nights by my orders.” She looked straight before her, seeing no one, as she gave her commands to the women: fire and hot water and stimulants, in the kitchen of the old house at once, and another man, if one could be found to follow her. The two figures moving across the grass might have stepped out of an illustration in the pages of some current magazine. In their thoughts they had already unlocked the door of that living death and were face to face with the insupportable facts of nature. The morbid, sickening, prison odor met them at the door--humanity's helpless protest against bolts and bars. Again the young man begged his companion not to enter. She took one deep breath of the pure outside air and stepped before him. They searched the emptiness of the barely furnished room. The clock ticked on to itself. Mrs. Bogardus's companion stood irresolute, not knowing the place. The fetid air confused his senses. But she went past him through the inner door, guided by remembrance of the sounds she had heard. She had seen it. She approached it cautiously, stooping for a better view, and closing in upon it warily, as one cuts off the retreat of a creature in the last agonies of flight. Her companion heard her say: “Show me your face!--Uncover his face,” she repeated, not moving her eyes as he stepped behind her. “He will not let me near him. Uncover it.”