himself,
it was the son he had remotely yearned for in his loneliness; if he had
been his father watching his sunk lids with bated breath, he would have
felt just these unmerciful pangs.

He also watched because in the boy's hours of fevered unconsciousness he
could at times catch words--sometimes broken sentences, which threw
ghastly light upon things past. Sometimes their significance was such as
made him shudder. A condition the doctors most dreaded was one in which
monstrous scenes seem lived again--scenes in which cruelties and
maddening suffering and despairing death itself rose vividly from the
depth of subconsciousness and cried aloud for vengeance. Sometimes Donal
shuddered, tearing at his chest with both hands, more than once he lay
sobbing until only skilled effort prevented his sobs from becoming
choking danger.

"It may be years after he regains his strength," the chief physician
said, "years before it will be safe to ask him for detail. On my own
part I would _never_ bring such horrors back to a man. You may have
noticed how the men who have borne most, absolutely refuse to talk."

"It's an accursed fool who tries to make them," broke in one of the
younger men. "There was a fellow who had been pinned up against a barn
door and left to hang there--and a coarse, loud-mouthed lunatic asked
him to describe how it felt. The chap couldn't stand it. Do you know
what he did? He sprang at him and knocked him down. He apologized
afterwards and said it was his nerves. But there's not a man who was
there who will ever speak to that other brute again."

The man whose name was Jackson seemed to be a clinging memory to the
skeleton when its mind wandered in the past Hades. He had been in some
way very close to the boy. He had died somehow--cruelly. There had been
blood--blood--and no one would help. Some devil had even laughed. When
that scene came back the doctors and nurses held their breath and
silently worked hard. Nothing seemed quite as heart-rending as what had
happened to Jackson. But there were endless other things to shudder at.

* * * * *

So the time passed and Nurse Jones found many times that she must stop
at his door on her way to her rest to say, "Don't look like that, Lord
Coombe. You need not send for his mother yet."

Then at last--and it had been like travelling for months waterless in a
desert--she came in one day with a new and elate countenance. "Mrs. Muir
is