I fully expected to be summoned as a witness to the inquest held on George White. However, as it turned out, they left me alone, and for that I was thankful, though indeed I had little to fear from any cross-examination; and Dr. Crackenthorpe would hardly have ventured under the circumstances to use his professional influence to my discomfiture, seeing that I had shown knowledge of the fact that between him and the dead man was once, at least, some species of understanding. So he gave his version of the affair, without any reference to me, who indeed could hardly in any way be held responsible for the catastrophe. And now he lay dead, the latest victim of the inquisition of the wheel, I most fully believed; a poor wretch withered under its ban that would reach, it seemed, to agents but remotely connected with the dark history of its immediate neighbors. He was dead, and with him, I could but think, had passed my one chance of probing the direful mystery in that direction where the core of it festered. Thereafter for weeks I walked in a stubborn rebellion against fate, intensified by the thought that this stultifying of my purpose had come upon me on the heels of my triumphant mastery of that old weird influence of the mill--a triumph that had seemed to pronounce me the very chosen champion of truth to whom all ways to the undoing of the wicked should be revealed. But, now, as the month drew to its close, a new anxiety came to humble me with the pathos of the world, and to assimilate all restless emotions into one pale fog of silence, gray and sorrowful. On a certain morning, looking in my father’s face when I brought him his breakfast, I read something there, the import of which I would not consider or dwell upon until I could escape and commune with myself alone. There was little external change in him and he was bright and cheerful. It was only a certain sudden sense of withdrawal that struck a chill into me--a sense as if life, seeking to steal unobserved from its ancient prison, knew itself noticed and affected to be dallying simply with the rusted locks and bolts. Realizing this presently to the full, I determined then and there to put everything else to one side and to devote myself single-handed to the tender ministering to his last days upon earth. And grief and sadness were mingled in me, for I loved the old man and could not but rejoice that the inevitable should come to him so peacefully. But prospect of the utter loneliness that would fall upon me when he was gone woke a selfish resentment that he should be taken from me and fought in my heart for mastery over the better emotion. Did he know? Not certainly, perhaps, for slowly dying men give little thought to the way they wander. But something in the prospect opening out before him must, I think, have struck him with a dawning marvel at its strangeness; as a sleeper, wakened from a weird romance of dreaming, finds a wonder of unfamiliarity in the world restored to him.