The thing in the corner had some time been a man. There was still enough manhood left to feel her eyes and to shrink as an earthworm from the spade. He had crawled close to the baseboard of the room. An old man's ashen beard straggled through the brown claws wrapped about the face. As the dust of the threshing floor to the summer grain, so was his likeness to one she remembered. “I must see that man's face!” she panted. “He will die if I touch him. Take away his hands.” It was done, with set teeth, and the face of the football hero was bathed in sweat. He breathed through tense nostrils, and a sickly whiteness spread backward from his lips. Suddenly he loosed his burden. It fell, doubling in a ghastly heap, and he rushed for the open air. Mrs. Bogardus groaned. She raised herself up slowly, stretching back her head. Her face was like the terrible tortured mask of the Medusa. She had but a moment in which to recover herself. Deliberately she spoke when her companion returned and stood beside her. “That was my husband. If he lives I am still his wife. You are not to forget this. It is no secret. Are you able to help me now? Get a blanket from the women. I hear some one coming.” She waited, with head erect and eyes closed and rigid tortured lips apart, till the feet were heard at the door. XXVI PEACE TO THIS HOUSE Mrs. Remsen and her delicate daughter had driven away to avoid excitement and the night air. Chauncey hovered round the piazza steps, talking, with but little encouragement, to Miss Sallie and the young man who had become the centre of all eyes. “I don't see how anybody on the face of the earth could blame her, nor me either!” Chauncey protested. “If the critter wanted to git out, why couldn't he say so? I stood there holdin' the door open much as five minutes. 'Who's in there?' I says. I called it loud enough to wake the dead. 'Nobody wants to hurt ye,' says I. There want nothing to be afraid of. He hadn't done nothing anyway. It's the strangest case ever I heard tell of. And the doctor don't think he was much crazy either.” “Can he live?” asked Miss Sallie. “He's alive now, but doctor don't know how long he'll last. There he comes now. I must go and git his horse.” The doctor, who seemed nervous,--he was a young local practitioner,--asked to speak with Miss Sallie's hero apart. “Did Mrs. Bogardus say anything when she first saw that man? Did you notice what she said?--how she took it?” The hero, who was also a gentleman, looked at the doctor coolly. “It was not a nice thing,” he said. “I saw just as little as I could.” “You don't understand me,” said the doctor. “I want to know if Mrs. Bogardus appeared to you to have made any discovery--received any shock not to be accounted for by--by what you both saw?” “I shouldn't attempt to answer such a question,” said the youngster bluntly. “I never saw Mrs. Bogardus in my life before to-day.”