As he stood stock still, she got the drawer open and took out the weapon. She caressed it, and nodded her head, mumbling drowsily, “Yes, yes, I must, I must save her from him!” Her lips moved, but her eyes were not open. With all gentleness, he took her hand and lifted from her unresisting fingers the pistol. Then he set his arms about Patty and guided her back to bed. He lifted her feet between the sheets and drew the covers over her. She breathed the placid, shallow breath of one who sleeps, but she clung to his hands so that he could hardly free them. Then he hid the pistol under the mattress beneath his head and thanked heaven for one horror at least that had been forestalled. By and by Patty, still aslumber, turned into his bosom and laid her little hands beneath his chin. He sighed, “Thank God for sleep!” But even in her sleep there was purgatory, for she twitched and clutched him in incessant nightmares. The next morning she said nothing of her dream or her somnambulism. And he felt no need of questioning her. The soul has its own torture chambers, where even love has no right of entry, especially when it knows too well what is within. All that Patty said was: “I don’t feel well enough to get up to-day. I’ll just rest here.” Late that forenoon Immy drove up alone from White Plains, where she and her husband had found lodging at a tavern. She led her father into his library and said to him: “Harry—my husband—and I have talked things over and he’s—we’ve decided to go back to California. I think I’d be happier out there—away from everything. I think Mamma would be happier. You haven’t congratulated me yet, so I congratulate you on getting me honestly married off. That’s something in these days. Besides, nobody will miss me much.” As RoBards looked at her now, she was not the wife of Chalender or anybody: she was the little, ill-fated girl he had defended in vain against life. She had secured herself a new defender—against too much sober thought about things. He realized how canny she had been, how lonely and how afraid. His arms went leaping out to her. She flung herself into his lap and he clenched her fiercely, kissing the rippling curls along the top of her bent head, and moaning: “Oh, my baby, my baby!” Then she broke into sobs: “Don’t say that word, Papa! That’s the word I said when I lost my baby—as you’ve lost yours. Where have they gone, Papa, your baby and mine? Where have they both gone? Where does everything go that we love and lose?” CHAPTER XLII The newspapers made a pretty story of the Chalender-RoBards marital alliance. For once, they overlooked a horror and gave space to romance. The retreat in Westchester had saved the family once more.