hurriedly down town
before going to the office. But at noon, beginning to worry about
Kitty, he had decided to go home and take her out to lunch. After that
there had been the note on his pillow. The pile of lingerie in the
closet was gone--and she had left instructions for sending her trunk.

He had never been so hungry, he thought.

At five o'clock, when the visiting nurse tiptoed down-stairs, he was
sitting on the sofa staring at the carpet.

"Mr. Cromwell?"

"Yes?"

"Oh, Mrs. Curtain won't be able to see you at dinner. She's not well
She told me to tell you that the cook will fix you something and that
there's a spare bedroom."

"She's sick, you say?"

"She's lying down in her room. The consultation is just over."

"Did they--did they decide anything?"

"Yes," said the nurse softly. "Doctor Jewett says there's no hope. Mr.
Curtain may live indefinitely, but he'll never see again or move again
or think. He'll just breathe."

"Just breathe?"

"Yes."

For the first time the nurse noted that beside the writing-desk where
she remembered that she had seen a line of a dozen curious round
objects she had vaguely imagined to be some exotic form of decoration,
there was now only one. Where the others had been, there was now a
series of little nail-holes.

Harry followed her glance dazedly and then rose to his feet.

"I don't believe I'll stay. I believe there's a train."

She nodded. Harry picked up his hat.

"Good-by," she said pleasantly.

"Good-by," he answered, as though talking to himself and, evidently
moved by some involuntary necessity, he paused on his way to the door
and she saw him pluck the last object from the wall and drop it into
his pocket.

Then he opened the screen door and, descending the porch steps, passed
out of her sight.

V

After a while the coat of clean white paint on the Jeffrey Curtain
house made a definite compromise with the suns of many Julys and
showed its good faith by turning gray. It scaled--huge peelings of
very brittle old paint leaned over backward like aged men practising
grotesque gymnastics and finally dropped to a moldy death in the
overgrown grass beneath. The paint on the front pillars became
streaky; the white ball was knocked off the left-hand door-post; the
green blinds darkened, then lost all pretense of color.

It began to be a house that was avoided by the tender-minded--some
church bought a lot diagonally opposite for a graveyard, and this,
c