"It's a cruel long way down the hall," suggested Guthrie. "Wouldn't you like me to carry you?" "Yes--I--would," sighed the Little Psychology Teacher. Even to Guthrie's apprehensive mind, her weight proved most astonishingly light. The small head drooping limply back from the slender neck seemed actually the only heavy thing about her, yet there were apparently only two ideas in that head. "I'm afraid of Hanlon's Mary, and I don't like Dr. Andrews--very--specially--much," she kept repeating aimlessly. Then halfway to her room her body stiffened suddenly. "Mr. Donas Guthrie," she asked. "Do you think I'm probably going to die?" "N-a-w!" said Guthrie, his nose fairly crinkling with positiveness. "But they don't give you much of anything to eat in typhoid, do they?" she persisted hectically. "I suppose not," acknowledged Guthrie. With disconcerting unexpectedness she began to cry--a soft, low, whimpery cry like a sleepy child's. "If any day should come when--they think--that I am going to die," she moaned, "who will there be to see that I do get--something awfully good to eat?" "I'll see to it," said Guthrie, "if you'll only put me in authority." As though altogether indifferent to anything that he might say, her tension relaxed again and without further parleying she let Guthrie carry her across the threshold of her room and set her down cautiously in the creaky rocking chair. The eyes that lifted to his were as vague and turbid as brown velvet. "There's one good thing about typhoid," she moaned. "It doesn't seem to hurt any, does it? In fact, I think I rather like it. It feels as warm and snug and don't-care as a hot lemonade at bed time. But what?" brightening suddenly, "but what was it you asked me to think about? I feel sort of confused--but it was something, I remember, that I was going to argue with you about." "It was what I said about marrying me," prompted Guthrie. "Oh, y-e-s," smiled the Little Psychology Teacher. Hazily for a moment she continued staring at him with her fingers prodded deep into her temples. Then suddenly, like a flower blasted with heat, she wilted down into her chair, groping blindly out with one hand toward the sleeve of his coat. "Whatever you think best to do about it," she faltered, "I guess you'd better arrange pretty quickly--'cause I think--I'm--going--out." This is how it happened that Mr. and Mrs. Donas Guthrie and Dr. Andrews stayed behind at the ranch house with Hanlon and Hanlon's Mary, and a piebald pony or two, and a herd of Angora goats, and a pink geranium plant, and the strange intermittent smell of a New England farmhouse which lurked in Hanlon's goods and chattels even after thirty years, and three or four stale, tattered magazines--and typhoid fever. It was typhoid fever that proved essentially the most incalculable companion of them all. Hanlon's austerity certainly never varied from day to day, nor the inherent sullenness of Hanlon's Mary.