In the acutest misery of it a trembling fit seized him and the oak seemed to rock and sway as if to be rid of him. When the fit passed he slid to the ground and flung himself face downward under the spreading branches. The grass was cool to his face, but there was no moisture in it, and he thought of Dives praying that Lazarus might come and put a drop of water on his tongue. Then the torment took a new and more terrible form. Though he had never been inside of the gray stone manor-house, his imagination transported him thither; to the house and to a darkened room on the upper floor with a bed in it, and in the bed a girl whose face he could not see. The girl was dying: the doctor had told his mother and the Major, and they were all waiting. Thomas Jefferson had never seen any one die, only a dog that Tike Bryerson had shot on one of his drunken home-goings. But death was death, to a dog or to a girl; and vivid imagination supplied the appalling details. Over and over again in pitiless minuteness the heartbreaking scene was repeated: the little twitchings of the bed-clothing, the tossing of the girl's arms in the last desperate struggle for breath, his mother's low sobs, and the haggard face of the old Major. Thomas Jefferson dug his fingers and toes into the grass and bit a mouthful of it to stifle the cry wrung from him by the torturing poignancy of it. Was there no way of escape? He turned over and sat up to try to think it out. Yes, there was a way--the way which would be taken by the boy in the Sunday-school books. He would say he was sorry, and would have his sins washed away, and there would be rejoicing in Heaven over the one sinner who had repented. Of course, the girl would die, just the same, and all the misery his sin had caused would remain unchanged. But _he_ would escape. For one unworthy moment Thomas Jefferson was fiercely tempted. Then the dogged Gordon blood reasserted itself. He had done the dreadful thing: he had asked God to take this girl out of his way, and now he would accept what he had coveted and would not try to sneak out of paying. It comforted him a little to think that, after all, there must eventually be some sort of end to the torment, away on in the eternities to come. When he had suffered all he could suffer, not even God could make him suffer any more. When he finally recrossed the creek on the dam head it was supper-time, and his mother had returned. The misery had now settled into dumb despair, both more and less agonizing than the acute remorse of the afternoon. What he needed to know was told in his mother's answer to his father's inquiry: "Yes; she is a very sick child. I'm going up again after supper to stay as long as I'm needed. It's a judgment on the Major; he has been setting the creature above the Creator."