With one delicate act of his good right hand he could rescue Immy from a lifetime of skulking; save at the same time this poor little, innocent, doomed petitioner from slinking crying down the years. He could save Patty from a lifetime of obloquy and humiliation. He could save his own name, his ancestors, his posterity, and the integrity of this old house—all by one brief contraction of his fingers. With a groan of joy in the magnificence of this supernal opportunity to be a man, a father, a god, he rehearsed the gesture, put his hand to the imaginary baby’s throat. He drove his will into his fingers. But they could not bend. His hand was frozen. CHAPTER XXXVIII Only now that he tried to use his hands and found them without hinges or feeling did he realize how cold he had been. Pain began in him, and fear. He had endured a stealthily creeping paralysis and when he heard Patty’s step, he was almost afraid to speak lest his words come forth brittle and fall breaking on the floor. He turned in slow, thudding steps. Patty shivered in the frigid air and hitched her shawl about her, tucking in her hands as she scolded: “What on earth! The window open! Are you mad?” No answer came from RoBards. His brain might as well have been snow. He stood holding out his hands as if they were something dead. Patty ran to him and seizing his fingers cried out in pain at them. He was alive, he could be hurt. She began to chafe his fingers in hers, to blow on them with her warm breath. She ran to the window and raising it scooped up a double handful of snow and wrapped it about his hands. Snow was warm to him, but bitter cold to her little palms. She was warm and soft where she touched him. She bustled about for cold water to pour on his hands, for anything that could save them. She sought for warm thoughts to keep her world from icy inanition. “I hate people who say that terrible things are for the best. But maybe this is, for once. The baby—the poor little baby—I was alone and I was so busy taking care of Immy, that I—I forgot till it was too late to—to——” RoBards groaned: “You don’t mean that the baby is dead?” If Patty had looked away with shame he would have felt that she felt guilty of a cruel negligence, but she stared straight into his eyes. She seemed almost to lean on his eyes. And so he felt that she was defying him to accuse her of what she had done. He dared not take the dare. Then she began with suspicious garrulity: “Maybe it was God that took the baby back. He has solved our problem. If the poor little thing had lived—think! But now! It’s too bad, but—well, Immy’s a girl again. And nobody knows, nobody knows! Nobody need ever know.” But they were not rid of the baby yet. It waited on the sill of their decision. Its body, built in secret with so much mystic care and borne with such agony, was empty, but as inescapable as an abandoned house.