“I was too late!” she said in a dull voice. “They had done it!” She covered her eyes, moved back from the men beside her, from him. “Swinging a little... all alone! So sudden—there, before me!” A violent shivering seized her. “Come,” Alexander Hulings said hoarsely; “you must get out of the wet. Warm things. Immediately!” He called imperatively for Gisela's maid, and together they assisted her up to her room. Above, Gisela had a long, violent chill; and he sent a wagon for the doctor at Harmony. The doctor arrived, and mounted the stairs; but, half an hour later, he would say little. Alexander Hulings commanded him to remain in the house. The lines deepened momentarily on the former's countenance; he saw himself unexpectedly in a shadowy pier glass, and stood for a long while subconsciously surveying the lean, grizzled countenance that followed his gaze out of the immaterial depths. “Alexander Hulings,” he said aloud, in a tormented mockery; “the master of—of life!” He was busy with the local marshal when the doctor summoned him from the office. “Your wife,” the other curtly informed him, “has developed pneumonia.” Hulings steadied himself with a hand against a wall. “Pneumonia!” he repeated, to no one in particular. “Send again for John Wooddrop.” He was seated, a narrow, rigid figure, waiting for the older man, in the midst of gorgeous upholstery. Two facts hammered with equal persistence on his numbed brain: one that all his projects, his dream of power, of iron, now approached ruin, and the other that Gisela had pneumonia. It was a dreadful thing that she had come on in the Mills tract! The Columbus System must triumphantly absorb all that he had, that he was to be. Gisela had been chilled to the bone; pneumonia! It became difficult and then impossible to distinguish one from the other—Gisela and the iron were inexplicably welded in the poised catastrophe of his ambition. Alexander Hulings rose, his thin lips pinched, his eyes mere sparks, his body tense, as if he were confronting the embodied force that had checked him. He stood upright, so still that he might have been cast in the metal that had formed his vision of power, holding an unquailing mien. His inextinguishable pride cloaked him in a final contempt for all that life, that fate, might do. Then his rigidity was assaulted by John Wooddrop's heavy and hurried entrance into the room. Hulings briefly repeated the doctor's pronouncement Wooddrop's face was darkly pouched, his unremoved hat a mere wet film, and he left muddy exact footprints wherever he stepped on the velvet carpet. “By heaven!” he quavered, his arms upraised. “If between us we have killed her——” His voice abruptly expired.