She made no reply and did not rise. Outside, the place seemed so deadly still! The house was dark; the neighboring avenue, unusually deserted. Sommers shivered. After he had reached the end of the lane, he turned back, and walked swiftly to the cottage. At the corner he looked into the room where they had been sitting. She was still in the same place where he had left her, by the lamp, her white, almost stern face, with its large, severe lines, staring fiercely into space. It made him uneasy, this long, tense look that betrayed a mind fixed upon one idea, and that idea! He crept away into the lane to flee from it, and walked swiftly down the cross street toward the lake. CHAPTER XXII "It could not be!" he muttered, as he stumbled on in the dark. He was oversuspicious. But how else could the facts be explained? Such deaths, he knew, did not occur to men in Preston's condition,--calm, easy deaths, without the agony of convulsion. _No_, it _must be_. Science was stronger than desire, than character, than human imagination. To disbelieve his scientific knowledge would be to deny the axioms of life. And why should it not be? Was it not what he had reproached himself for not doing, and reproached his medical brethren as cowards for not daring to do in so many cases? The horror of it, the uncanniness of it, thus stopping the human animal's course as one would stop an ill-regulated watch, had never appealed to him before. "Prejudice!" he cried aloud. His involuntary drawing back was but an unconscious result of the false training of centuries. As a doctor, familiar with death, cherishing no illusions about the value of the human body, he should not act like a nervous woman, and run away! How brutal he had been to her! His mind passed on, traversing vast areas of speculation by a kind of cerebral shorthand. What would be the result upon humanity if all doctors took this liberty of decision? Where could you draw the distinction between murder and medicine? Was science advanced enough as yet to say any certain thing about the human body and mind? There were always mysterious exceptions which might well make any doctor doubtful of drastic measures. And the value of human life, so cheap here in this thirsty million of souls, cheap in the hospitals; but really, essentially, at the bottom of things, who knew how cheap it was? Thus for an hour or more his mind was let loose among the tenebra of life, while his feet pushed on mechanically over the dusty roads that skirted the lake. He had nowhere to go, now that he had broken with the routine of life, and he gave himself up to the unaccustomed debauch of willess thinking. He was conscious at length of traversing the vacant waste where the service-buildings of the Fair had stood. Beyond were the shattered walls of the little convent, wrapped in the soft summer night. There they had sat together and watched the fire die out, while she told her story, and he listened in love.