spitality prevailed. He knocked lightly; there was no
response. He turned the door handle softly. The door opened. A faint
clean perfume--an odor of some general personality rather than any
particular thing--stole out upon them. The light of Seth's candle struck
a few glints from some cut-glass and silver, the contents of the guest's
dressing case, which had been carefully laid out upon a small table by
his negro servant. There was also a refined neatness in the disposition
of his clothes and effects which struck the feminine eye of even the
tidy Mrs. Rivers as something new to her experience. Seth drew nearer
the bed with his shaded candle, and then, turning, beckoned his wife to
approach. Mrs. Rivers hesitated--but for the necessity of silence
she would have openly protested--but that protest was shut up in her
compressed lips as she came forward.

For an instant that awe with which absolute helplessness invests the
sleeping and dead was felt by both husband and wife. Only the upper part
of the sleeper's face was visible above the bedclothes, held in position
by a thin white nervous hand that was encircled at the wrist by a
ruffle. Seth stared. Short brown curls were tumbled over a forehead damp
with the dews of sleep and exhaustion. But what appeared more singular,
the closed eyes of this vessel of wrath and recklessness were fringed
with lashes as long and silky as a woman's. Then Mrs. Rivers gently
pulled her husband's sleeve, and they both crept back with a greater
sense of intrusion and even more cautiously than they had entered. Nor
did they speak until the door was closed softly and they were alone on
the landing. Seth looked grimly at his wife.

"Don't look much ez ef he could hurt anybody."

"He looks like a sick man," returned Mrs. Rivers calmly.

The unconscious object of this criticism and attention slept until late;
slept through the stir of awakened life within and without, through the
challenge of early cocks in the lean-to shed, through the creaking
of departing ox teams and the lazy, long-drawn commands of teamsters,
through the regular strokes of the morning pump and the splash of water
on stones, through the far-off barking of dogs and the half-intelligible
shouts of ranchmen; slept through the sunlight on his ceiling, through
its slow descent of his wall, and awoke with it in his eyes! He woke,
too, with a delicious sense of freedom from pain, and of even drawing
a long breath without difficul