contempt do we look upon those garments during our lifetime! And
how they live on, defying time, long, long after we have been gathered
to our last rest.

In some miraculous manner Blackie had lived on for two days after that
ghastly ride. Peter had been killed instantly, the doctors said. They
gave no hope for Blackie. My escape with but a few ridiculous bruises
and scratches was due, they said, to the fact that I had sat in the
tonneau. I heard them all, in a stupor of horror and grief, and wondered
what plan Fate had in store for me, that I alone should have been
spared. Norah and Max came, and took things in charge, and I saw Von
Gerhard, but all three appeared dim and shadowy, like figures in a mist.
When I closed my eyes I could see Peter's tense figure bending over
Blackie at the wheel, and heard his labored breathing as he struggled in
his mad fury, and felt again the helpless horror that had come to me as
we swerved off the road and into the ditch below, with Blackie, rigid
and desperate, still clinging to the wheel. I lived it all over and
over in my mind. In the midst of the blackness I heard a sentence that
cleared the fog from my mind, and caused me to raise myself from my
pillows.

Some one--Norah, I think--had said that Blackie was conscious, and that
he was asking for some of the men at the office, and for me. For me! I
rose and dressed, in spite of Norah's protests. I was quite well, I told
them. I must see him. I shook them off with trembling fingers and when
they saw that I was quite determined they gave in, and Von Gerhard
telephoned to the hospital to learn the hour at which I might meet the
others who were to see Blackie for a brief moment.

I met them in the stiff little waiting room of he hospital--Norberg,
Deming, Schmidt, Holt--men who had known him from the time when they
had yelled, "Heh, boy!" at him when they wanted their pencils sharpened.
Awkwardly we followed the fleet-footed nurse who glided ahead of us
down the wide hospital corridors, past doorways through which we caught
glimpses of white beds that were no whiter than the faces that lay on
the pillows. We came at last into a very still and bright little room
where Blackie lay.

Had years passed over his head since I saw him last? The face that tried
to smile at us from the pillow was strangely wizened and old. It was as
though a withering blight had touched it. Only the eyes were the same.
They glowed in the sunken face, beneath