"Very little. I don't see a great deal of people, Rod. Every one has been lovely to me. But--I don't fit into the giddy pace. You know, if you don't flutter prettily and with all your heart, you don't make a hit with the butterflies. Since I came back from London I've--I've just put in the time. You know--oh, we're a pair of softies--but it is good to be together. We have played the game." A Chinese boy brought in tea and cakes. Rod and Mary toasted their feet at the blaze and sipped tea and talked. The windows that gave seaward over English Bay shivered in their casings under the gusty puffs of the storm wind. A chime struck ten. "Is there a bedroom upstairs?" Rod roused himself out of a silence to ask. "Two. But neither is completely furnished. There are two nice ones on the ground floor, which is plenty for us so long as we have no guests. Why?" "I would much rather sleep upstairs." "Why?" Mary repeated. "Doctor's orders," he answered lightly. "High altitude advised. Oh, it's just a notion of mine. You'll have to humor me." "It's easily arranged," she said. "I'll have Yick make up a bed. You _are_ whimsical, though, Rod. What's back of the notion?" He laughed it off. An hour later, feeling himself sink into sleep with a delicious, pervasive sensation of contentment, his last conscious reflection was a hope that he would never have to explain what lay back of the notion. He felt Mary's arm resting across him. Surely body and soul could be at peace henceforth. Well on in the night he wakened with a familiar apprehension tugging at his consciousness. His brain was quite clear. He knew what was happening. It had overtaken him before. The thinking, reasoning part of him, or perhaps the purely intuitive, urged that he rise and fight off a paralyzing numbness that seized his feet, his hands, that crept slowly upward and inward, chilling his flesh. Curious, he thought, to die like that, to stand by and watch himself run down like an unwound clock. He could hear the slow regular breathing of his wife beside him. He could feel the even beat of her heart where her breast pressed against his shoulder. His own heart had stopped,--fluttered and stopped as he awoke. Would it begin again? He lay waiting, feeling that numbness seize his limbs, feeling his breathing grow more difficult.