"Fill!" There was something akin to actual terror in the voice of the Meanest Trustee. He could feel himself growing pale; his tongue seemed to drop back in his throat, choking him. "That would take a great deal of money," he managed to wheeze out at last; and then he braced himself, his hands clutched deep in his pockets. "I will never pay; never, never, never!" "Oh yes, you will!" and the piper's smile was insultingly cheerful. "It was a great deal of joy, you know," he reminded him. "Come, lads"--to the other pipers--"hold out your caps, there." The Meanest Trustee had the strange experience of feeling himself worked by a force outside of his own will; it was as if he had been a marionette with a master-hand pulling the wires. Quite mechanically he found himself taking something out of his pocket and dropping it into the caps thrust under his very nose, and at the same time his pockets began to fill with money--his money. In and out, in and out, his hands flew like wooden members, until there was not a coin left and the last piper turned away satisfied. He closed his eyes, for he was feeling very weak; then he became conscious of the touch of a warm, friendly hand on his wrist and he heard the voice of the old family doctor--the one who had set his leg when he was a little shaver and had fallen off the banisters, sliding downstairs. "You will recover," it was saying. "A good rest is all you need. Sometimes there is nothing so beneficial and speedy as the old-fashioned treatment of bleeding a patient." Some warm ashes dropped across the wrist of the Meanest Trustee and scattered on the floor; his cigar had gone out. The Executive Trustee dozed at his study table. For months he had been working his brain overtime; he had still more to demand of it, and he was deliberately detaching it from immediate executive consciousness for a few minutes that he might set it to work again all the harder. The Executive Trustee knew that he was dozing; but for all that it was unbearable--this feeling of being bound by coil after coil of rope until he could not stir a finger. A terrifying numbness began to creep over him--as if his body had died. The thought came to him like a shock that he had an active, commanding intelligence, still alive, and nothing for it to command. What did people do who had to live with dead, paralyzed bodies, dependent upon others to execute the dictates of their brains? Did not their brains go in the end, too, and leave just a breathing husk behind? The thought became a horror to him.