ogether. And I envy him! I envy him as blackly as
your pines envied the sumac. He's got out of the wrong role into the
right one. I wish to the Lord I could!"

They were close to the house now, in the avenue of poplars, yellow as
gold above them in the quick-falling autumn twilight. Sylvia spoke
with a quick, spirited sincerity, her momentary pique forgotten, her
feeling rushing out generously to meet the man's simple openness. "Oh,
that's the problem for all of us! To know what role to play! If you
think it hard for you who have only to choose--how about the rest of
us who must--?" She broke off. "What's that? What's that?"

She had almost stumbled over a man's body, lying prone, half in the
driveway, half on the close-clipped grass on the side; a well-dressed
man, tall, thin, his limbs sprawled about broken-jointedly. He lay on
his back, his face glimmering white in the clear, dim dusk. Sylvia
recognized him with a cry. "Oh, it's Arnold! He's been struck by a
car! He's dead!"

She sprang forward, and stopped short, at gaze, frozen.

The man sat up, propping himself on his hands and looked at her, a
wavering smile on his lips. He began to speak, a thick, unmodulated
voice, as though his throat were stiff. "Comingtomeetyou," he
articulated very rapidly and quite unintelligibly, "an 'countered hill
in driveway ... no hill _in_ driveway, and climbed and climbed"--he
lost himself in repetition and brought up short to begin again,
"--labor so 'cessive had to rest--"

Sylvia turned a paper-white face on her companion. "What's the matter
with him?" she tried to say, but Page only saw her lips move. He made
no answer. That she would know in an instant what was the matter
flickered from her eyes, from her trembling white lips; that she did
know, even as she spoke, was apparent from the scorn and indignation
which like sheet-lightning leaped out on him. "Arnold! For _shame_!
Arnold! Think of Judith!"

At the name he frowned vaguely as though it suggested something
extremely distressing to him, though he evidently did not recognize
it. "Judish? Judish?" he repeated, drawing his brows together and
making a grimace of great pain. "What's Judish?"

And then, quite suddenly the pain and distress were wiped from his
face by sodden vacuity. He had hitched himself to one of the poplars,
and now leaned against this, his head bent on his shoulder at the
sickening angle of a man hanged, his eyes glassy, his mouth open,
a trickle o