“I know Uncle Zach and Dotty would be glad to see you, and in the spring we will go there,” he said to Mark, who, buoyed up with this hope, counted the weeks as they passed away, knowing the while that his strength was slipping from him and leaving him so weak that he staid all day in his room where Tom came every night to see him, and Mark, who had forgotten all the blame he had ever attributed to him, clung to him, as if he had been his son. “I shan’t go to Ridgefield. I’ve given that up,” he said to Tom one day in March. “It’s the cottage now in the valley I want to see. How soon do you think we can go there?” Tom didn’t know, and his face was very grave as he looked at his old comrade, who was so surely dying. Spring came early that year and as soon as it was at all practicable Tom took Mark by easy stages to the cottage. He had been there himself to see that it was made ready for the sick man and had passed a most uncomfortable time. He was neither a coward, nor superstitious, but during the three days and nights he spent alone in the cottage he suffered what he called the tortures of the damned. He heard or saw Inez everywhere. Saw her flitting in and out from room to room; heard her singing as she used to sing in her glad girlhood, and felt her kisses on his cheeks just as he felt them on the night of their betrothal. They were real kisses then which made his pulse beat with ecstasy; they were shadowy kisses now, which burned where they touched him, while his lips were purple with cold. Once he called to her, “Inez, Inez, do you know I am here?” Then in his disordered imagination he fancied he heard again the shriek which had curdled his blood when she sprang over the wheel and confronted him. “I am not afraid,” he said to himself, “but I wish Mark was here, or even Nero. I ought to have brought the dog, although he does not take to me as he used to do. I believe he knows something. Lucky he can’t talk.”