in the helplessness of this
longing his heart was pining.

"A man isn't going to die because he has asthma," had been the doctor's
fiat concerning Bates. He had come to Chellaston apparently so ill that
neither he nor his friends would have been much surprised had death been
the order of the day, but as the programme was life, not death, he was
forced to plan accordingly. His plans were not elaborate; he would go
back to the clearing; he would take his aunt back from Turrifs to be
with him; he would live as he had lived before.

Would he not sell the land? they asked; for the price offered for it was
good, and the lonely life seemed undesirable.

No, he would not sell. It would, he said, be selling a bit of himself;
and if there was value in it, it would increase, not diminish, by
holding till the country was opened up. When he was dead, his heirs, be
they who they might (this he said mysteriously), could do as they would.
As for him, he would take a man back from this part of the country to
work in Alec's place. His cough, he said, had been worse since he had
been beguiled into leaving his wilderness to travel with Alec; the pure
air of the solitude would be better than doctors for him.

The journey into which Alec had beguiled him had already had three
results: he had sold his lumber at a good price; had found out, by
talking with business men at Quebec, what the real value of his land
probably was, and would be; and had been put by Dr. Nash into a right
way of thinking concerning his disease and its treatment, that would
stand him in good stead for years to come; but none of these goodly
results did he mention when he summed up the evils and discomforts of
the trip in Alec's hearing. If his irascible talk was the index to his
mind, certainly any virtue Alec had exercised toward him would need to
be its own reward.

He offered to pay Alec his wages up to the time of their arrival in
Chellaston, because he had looked after him in his feebleness, and he
talked of paying "The Principal" for his board during his sojourn there.
When they treated these offers lightly, he sulked, mightily offended. He
would have given his life, had it been necessary, for either of the
brothers, because of the succour they had lent him; nay more, had they
come to him in need a lifetime afterwards, when most men would have had
time to forget their benefaction many times over, John Bates would have
laid himself, and all that he had, at th