“And when Stephen gets to acting up, just shake the window-curtain real hard and I’ll drop everything to come over and settle him,” said Mrs. Anderson zestfully. So far Stephen had not “acted up.” Probably, so Mrs. Anderson told Mrs. Knapp, “because as things are now he’s let to do just what he pleases and goodness knows what _that_ is!” Stephen had even been a stimulating element in his father’s days when they first began to emerge from the endless nightmare of pain and to become, once more, successive stages in a human life. Lester never spoke to any one about those first weeks after his fall and thought of them himself as little as possible. The mere casual mention of them afterwards brought the cold sweat out on him. No circle in any hell would have contained more concentrated suffering than was crowded into his every conscious moment--horrible, brute, physical suffering, tearing at every nerve, suffering that degraded him, that left him no humanity. When this was deadened for an instant by opiates or exhaustion, there were terrible hallucinations--he was again on the steep, icy roof, turning, death in his heart, to throw himself down into cold nothingness--he was falling, falling, endlessly falling ... and now he knew what intolerable anguish awaited him at the end of his fall. He screamed out dreadfully at such times and tore at the bedclothes as if to save himself. These moments of frenzy always ended by his coming to himself with a great start and finding himself burning and raging once more in unendurable physical pain. Later, once in a while, there were fleeting instants almost of lucidity during which, as he was flung through space by the whirlwind of that inhuman, impersonal agony, he yet caught glimpses as it were of his own personality lying there prone, waiting for him to come back to enter it. This half-consciousness always brought the same thought to him.... “Poor weak wretch! He had not even force enough to kill himself!” He thought it as of some one else, half-pityingly, half-contemptuously. Then came periods of freedom from pain, incredulous, breathless bliss, poisoned by his horrified apprehension of being touched; for the slightest touch, even of the bed, plunged him again into the abyss. During one of those respites when he lay, scarcely daring to breathe, there came to him the first personal sensation since his fall. He chanced to lie with his head turned towards the room, and for a moment he saw it, as it was, a part of human life, and not merely the background for this endless dying of his! On the floor sat Stephen, very dirty and uncared for, playing with his Teddy-bear! The expression on his face reminded Lester of something ... something, it seemed, which had begun, something with which he had wanted to go on. But just then Eva had brushed his pillow, and this glimpse back into the human life out of which he had hurled himself vanished in the molten lava of his physical pain.