ring arms of the Refuge. That awakening was almost to a
full and clear consciousness. It was with no confusion of thought and
but little confusion of sight, except for a white mist that seemed to
blur the things he saw.

He knew, instantly and vividly, where he was. Instantly and vividly
everything found its fit place in his mind--the long rows of cots; the
bald, garishly white walls, cold and unbeautiful in their immaculate
cleanliness; the range of curtainless windows looking out upon the
chill, thin gray of the winter day. He was not surprised to find himself
in the Refuge; it did not seem strange to him, and he did not wonder. He
dimly remembered stumbling through the snow-drifts and then falling
asleep, overpowered by an irresistible and leaden drowsiness. But just
where it was he fell, he could not recall.

He saw with dim sight that three or four people were gathered about his
bed. Two of them were rubbing his legs and feet, but he could not feel
them. It was this senselessness of feeling that first brought the
jarring of the truth to him. The house-steward stood near by, and Sandy
turned his face weakly toward him. "Mr. Jackson," said he, faintly, "I
think I'm going to die."

* * * * *

He turned his face again (now toward the opened window), and was staring
unwinkingly at a white square of light, and it seemed to him to grow
darker and darker. At first he thought that it was the gathering of
night, but faint and flickering as were his senses, there was something
beneath his outer self that dreaded it--that dreaded beyond measure the
coming of that darkness. After one or two efforts, in which his stiff
tongue refused to form the words he desired to speak, he said, at last,
"I can't see; it's--getting--dark."

* * * * *

He was dimly, darkly conscious of hurry and bustle around him, of voices
calling to send for the doctor, of hurrying hither and thither, but it
all seemed faint and distant. Everything was now dark to his sight, and
it was as though all this concerned another; but as outer things slipped
further and further from him, the more that inner life struggled,
tenaciously, dumbly, hopelessly, to retain its grip upon the outer
world. Sometimes, now and then, to this inner consciousness, it seemed
almost as though it were rising again out of the gathering blackness.
But it was only the recurrent vibrations of ebbing powers, for still
agai