It was after midnight when the descent began. The moon rode high among fleecy clouds, but on either side of the road gulfs of darkness lay under motionless foliage. Sometimes the smoky light from the swaying lantern shone on a wet black branch, snapped by the gale and lying in the path, and Eleanor, seeing it, wedging her heels into the mud and sliding stones of the road, and straining backward between the shafts, would say, "A snake.... I must save Maurice." Sometimes she would hear, above the crunching of the wheels behind her, a faint noise in the undergrowth: a breaking twig, a brushing sound, as of a furtive footstep--and she would say, "A man.... I must save Maurice." The yellow flame of the lantern was burning white in the dawn, as, holding back against the weight of the wagon--the palms of her bleeding hands clenched on the shafts, her feet slipping, her ankles twisted and wrenched--by and by, with the tears of physical suffering streaming down her face, she reached the foot of the mountain. The, thin, cool air of morning flowed about her in crystalline stillness; suddenly the sun tipped the green bowl of the world, and all at once shadows fell across the road like bars. They seemed to her, in her daze of terror and exhaustion, insurmountable: the road was level now, but she pulled and pulled, agonizingly, over those bars of nothingness; then one wheel sank into a rut, and the wagon came to a dead standstill; but at the same moment she saw ahead of her, among the trees, Doctor Bennett's dark, sleeping house. So, dropping the shafts, she went stumbling and running, to pound on the door, and gasp out: "Come--help--Maurice--come--" * * * * * "I think," she said afterward, lying like a broken thing upon her bed, "I was able to do it, because I kept saying, 'I must save Maurice.' Of course, to save Maurice, I wouldn't mind dying." "My dear, you are magnificent!" Mary Houghton said, huskily. Then she told her husband: "Henry, I _like_ her! I never thought I would, but I do." "I'll never say 'Mr. F.'s aunt' again!" he promised, with real contrition. It was Eleanor's conquering moment, for everybody liked her, and everybody said she was 'magnificent'--except Maurice, who, as he got well, said almost nothing. "I can't talk about it," was all he had to say, choking. "She's given her life for mine," he told the doctor. "I hope not," Doctor Bennett said, "I _hope_ not. But it will take months, Maurice, for her to get over this. As for saving your life, my boy, she didn't. She made things a lot more dangerous for you. She did the wrong thing--with greatness! You'd have come to, after a while. But don't tell her so." "Well, I should say not!" Maurice said, hotly. "She'll never know _that_! And anyway, sir, I don't believe it. I believe she saved my life."