Marshall, while grateful for her attentions, was almost embarrassed by them--not that they should come from her rather than from his wife (or at least more copiously and spontaneously), but that they should come at all. Never before in his life had he received such minute and solicitous ministrations; he felt with a shy self-depreciation that he must be making himself a great burden. If Susan Bates threw back her bonnet-strings and suggested to Jane a lowering of the window-shades, he would almost protest against the girl's laying aside her book or her sewing; and the preparation of any special dish, such as is an invalid's due, would even now still cause him that sense of guilt which he had always felt on breaking in upon the household routine of his wife. "Poor man!" Susan Bates would say; "how must he have lived all these years! Why, I could hardly get him even to let me oil the door-hinges!" She would sit by his bedside and try to soothe and divert this wan and weary and half-desperate old man. He enjoyed but the most fitful slumber, and even that only by the action of narcotics. Through the lagging hours of the day and through the maddening watches of the night his mind, ticking like an unstillable clock, beat for him an incessant rhythmical reminder of the impending ruin of his house and of his own powerlessness to avert it. He reviewed again and again the whole course of his life and his business--they were one: his lowly beginnings, his early struggles in the raw but ambitious prairie town, the laborious stages of endeavor by which he had developed and strengthened his business--his. Then, as the house had grown, others had insinuated themselves, or imposed themselves; and these were now banded together to dominate it, and to check and circumvent him, its founder and their benefactor, and finally to bring it to the very brink of ruin, and to make the labors of his whole lifetime come to naught. And he in bed here--with his feeble hands working desperately at the hem of the sheet, and his aching head throbbing unavailingly through the cruel, open-eyed watches of the night. He raged over the world's injustice and his own impotence; the thought was never absent from him--he was coming under the disastrous domination of the _idèe fixe_. He spoke of these things to Susan Bates with such an increasing frequency and insistency as almost to transfer the rack of them from his own brain to hers. Once or twice, in an interval of semi-delirium, he bewept the ruin not only of his business, but of himself and of his family and of all his belongings. He infected her with his own dread and panic; she saw his property dispersed, his home in others' hands, his family in the depths of despairing poverty. One morning she appeared at Roger's office; Minnie Peters accompanied her. The one carried a large leather bag in her hand; the other had a large brown-paper parcel under her arm.