.

Irene's mother and father had stood off at a distance for a long time,
but at length they missed Irene and came over to question Crosson. He
knew that Irene would not wish them present at such obsequies, and he
told them she had gone home.

After a time, curiosity nagged him into approaching her hiding-place. He
listened, and there was no sound. He peered in and dimly descried Drury.
He was not moving; he might have been asleep. Irene might have been
asleep, too, for she lay huddled up in what space there was.

Crosson knelt down and crawled in. She was unconscious. He touched Drury
with a dreading hand, which drew quickly back as from a contact with
ice.

A kind of panic seized Crosson. He backed out quickly and dragged Irene
away with him in awkward desperation.

As her body came forth, his gun came too. He thought it had lain
outside. He caught it and broke it at the breech, ejecting the two
shells; one of them was empty. He threw it into the wreck and pocketed
the other shell and tossed the gun under a stack of wreckage.

He was trying to revive Irene when her father and mother came back
anxiously to say that she was not at home. Her mother dropped down at
her side.

Crosson left Irene with her own people. He did not want to see her or
hear her when she came back to this miserable world. He did not want her
even to know what he knew.

III

Crosson had tried afterward to forget. It had been hard at first, but in
time he had forgotten. He had gone to a theological school and learned
to chide people for their complaints and to administer well-phrased
anodynes. During his vacations he had avoided Irene. When he had been
graduated he had been first pulpited in a far-off city.

Years afterward he had been invited to supply an empty pulpit in his
home town. He had not succeeded with life. He lacked the flame or the
luck or the tact--something. He had come back to the place he started
from. He had renewed old acquaintances, laughed over the ancient jokes,
and said he was sorry for those who had had misfortune. When he met
Irene Straley he hardly recalled his love, except to smile at it as a
boyish whim. He had forgotten the pangs of that as one forgets almost
all his yester aches. He had forgotten the pains he had seen others
suffer, even more easily than he forgot his own.

To-day his sermon on the triviality of bodily discomfort had flung Irene
Straley back into the caldron of that old torment. She had