he told her
mother that she had decided to put off her visit to Sibley, and at 10:30
she drove down to the station and sent her away composedly. At the
moment she was glad to get her out of the town, so that she should not
share in the grief of next day's departure. To Miss Franklin she then
confided the doctor's warning, and together they began to pack.

Haney, with lowering brow and bleeding heart, went to his bed denouncing
himself. "I have no right to her. 'Tis the time for me to step out. If
the doctor knows his business, 'tis only a matter of a few weeks,
anyhow, when my seat in the game will be empty. Why not stay here in me
own home and so end it all comfortably?"

This was so simple--and yet he spent most of the night fighting the
desire to live out those years the doctor had promised him. It was so
sweet to sit opposite that dear girl-face of a morning, to feel her hand
on his hair--now and again. "She's only a child--she can wait ten years
and still be young." But then came the thought: "'Tis harder for her to
wait than it is for me to go. 'Tis mere selfishness. What can I do in
the world? I have no interest in the game outside of her. No, Mart, the
consumptive is right, 'tis up to you to slip away, genteel and quiet, so
that your widow will not be troubled by anny gossip."

To use the pistol was easy, the handle fitted his hand, but to die so
that no shock or shame would come to her, that was his problem. "I will
not leave her the widow of a suicide," he resolved. "I must go so sly,
so casual-like, that no one will be able to point the finger at her or
Ben."

"Can I visit the mine once more?" he had asked Steele. "No," the doctor
had replied. "To go a thousand feet higher than this would be fatal."

As he mused on this he began to feel the wonder of the body in which he
dwelt. That a machine so bulky and so gross could be so delicate that a
change in the pressure of the atmosphere might be fatal astonished him.
"I'll soon know," he said, "for I cross the range to-morrow."

The dark shadow of the unseen world, once so dim and far, now rose
formidable as a mountain on the horizon of his thought. It was so
difficult to leave the house in which he had found peace and a strange
kind of happiness (the happiness of a soldier home on parole,
convalescent and content under the apple-trees)--it was very hard--and
the tenderness, the care, to which his little wife had returned and
which filled his heart with swee