made no difference--nothing mattered except to regain the ineffable
sense of approaching discovery which he had lost.

"Was it Abner Revercomb?" said the first voice more loudly.

He was conscious now of himself and of his surroundings, and there was
no uncertainty, no hesitation in his answer.

"It was an accident. I shot myself," he said, and after a moment he
added angrily, "Why should anybody shoot me? It would be ridiculous."

It was there again--the unexplored, the incalculable vastness. If they
would only leave him alone he might recover it before it eluded him.

CHAPTER XVI

THE END

In the middle of the afternoon Molly went into the spare room in the
west wing, and stopped beside the high white bed on which Gay was lying,
with the sheet turned down from his face. In death his features wore
a look of tranquil brightness, of arrested energy, as if he had paused
suddenly for a brief space, and meant to rise and go on again about the
absorbing business of living. The windows were open, and through the
closed shutters floated a pale greenish light and the sound of dead
leaves rustling softly in the garden.

She had hardly entered before the door opened noiselessly again, and
Kesiah came in bringing some white roses in a basket. Drawing a little
away, Molly watched her while she arranged the flowers with light and
guarded movements, as if she were afraid of disturbing the sleeper. Of
what was she thinking? the girl wondered. Was she grieving for her lost
youth, with its crushed possibilities of happiness, or for the rich
young life before her, which had left its look of arrested energy
still clinging to the deserted features? Was she saddened by the tragic
mystery of Death or by the more poignant, the more inscrutable mystery
of Life? Did she mourn all the things that had not been that did not
matter, or all the things that had been that mattered even less?

Lifting her eyes from Kesiah's face, she fixed them on a small old
picture of the elder Jonathan, which hung under a rusty sword above the
bed. For the first time there came to her an impulse of compassion for
the man who was her father. Perhaps he, also, had suffered because life
had driven him to do the things that he hated--perhaps he, also, had had
his secret chamber in which his spirit was crucified? With the thought
something in her heart, which was like a lump of ice, melted suddenly,
and she felt at peace. "Because I've lived," she said