While the young farmer and the two hired men labored in the rain that came as a deluge upon the gale’s heels, Mrs. Laight saddled and bridled a horse and forced it through the world of storm and across the barriers of blown-down trees into Kensico Village for Doctor Brockholst. By the time he arrived the broken body of RoBards was stretched upon the couch in the library. The master’s bedroom had been cracked open by the fallen tulip tree and the rain was thundering through it. The doctor, seeing the state of his patient and all his red wounds and hearing the groans he could not stifle, first checked the outlets of his blood, then made ready to give him ease of pain. Old RoBards was as eager for the anæsthetic as a starved infant for its mother’s milk, but he suddenly bethought him of his need of all his wits, and he gasped: “If—if you make me sleep, I may—may nev-never wake up, eh?” Doctor Brockholst tried to evade a direct answer, but RoBards panted: “I won’t risk it—risk it. I’ve sent—I’ve sent Laight to tele-telegraph my son to come up from—from town. There’s things I must say to him—before—before——” He was more afraid of unconsciousness than of pain, and he would not gamble with a palliation of his anguishes. He chattered to the doctor: “Just stay here and let me talk. It helps to keep me from making an old fool of myself. And don’t let me die till Keith comes. Don’t let me die till—oh, oh!—Oh, God! oh, God!” He gnawed his lips and twisted his face in all the fierce grimaces of a desperate athlete trying to pry himself from a hammerlock. He groaningly computed the hours it would take Keith to reach the farm if he got the message and came at once and caught a train. But those hours passed and Keith was not yet visible to Mrs. Laight watching from the porch in her wind-whipped skirts and her fluttering shawl. The old man moaned, watching the inexorably deliberate clock with white eyes; “The storm has torn down the telegraph poles, I suppose; or wrecked a bridge or two. But somehow, somebody will get the word to my boy and he’ll fight his way here. I know Keith!” The doctor pleaded with him to accept the aid of a sedative and even made a show of force, but the old man grew so frantic with resistance that he gave over. And after a time when Mrs. Laight had given up watching for Keith, there came upon his agonized mien a look almost of comfort. He smiled and murmured: “Now I know a little of what Patty suffered. I thought I knew before; but nobody can imagine pain—or remember it. It’s a hideous thing—to hurt. But I ought to be able to stand it for a night when that little girl bore far worse—far worse for years.” All the long evening, all the long night he babbled her name, and if at intervals he sobbed and the tears slid down his much-channeled features, it was for memory of the bitterness of her woe, and his belated understanding of it.