n his lips.

"It's the worst possible thing that could happen to him. Everybody
knows that"--then she looked after Daddy John. "Get the whisky at
once," she called. "I'll find the medicines."

"Can't I help?" the young man implored.

Without answering she started for the wagon, and midway between it and
the fire paused to cry back over her shoulder:

"Heat water, or if you can find stones heat them. We must get him
warm."

And she ran on.

David looked about for the stones. The "we" consoled him a little, but
he felt as if he were excluded into outer darkness, and at a moment
when she should have turned to him for the aid he yearned to give. He
could not get over the suddenness of it, and watched them forlornly,
gazing enviously at their conferences over the medicine chest, once
straightening himself from his search for stones to call longingly:

"Can't I do something for you over there?"

"Have you the stones?" she answered without raising her head, and he
went back to his task.

In distress she had turned from the outside world, broken every lien of
interest with it, and gone back to her own. The little circle in which
her life had always moved snapped tight upon her, leaving the lover
outside, as completely shut out from her and her concerns as if he had
been a stranger camped by her fire.

CHAPTER VIII

The doctor was ill. The next day he lay in the wagon, his chest
oppressed, fever burning him to the dryness of an autumn leaf. To the
heads that looked upon him through the circular opening with a
succession of queries as to his ailment, he invariably answered that it
was nothing, a bronchial cold, sent to him as a punishment for
disobeying his daughter. But the young men remembered that the journey
had been undertaken for his health, and Daddy John, in the confidential
hour of the evening smoke, told them that the year before an attack of
congestion of the lungs had been almost fatal.

Even if they had not known this, Susan's demeanor would have told them
it was a serious matter. She was evidently wracked by anxiety which
transformed her into a being so distant, and at times so cross, that
only Daddy John had the temerity to maintain his usual attitude toward
her. She would hardly speak to Leff, and to David, the slighting
coldness that she had shown in the beginning continued, holding him at
arm's length, freezing him into stammering confusion. When he tried to
offer her help or c