ounced that Madam Bartlett was not expected to live through the day.

Within twenty-four hours Eleanor was in Kentucky.

"Is she living?" she demanded of Hannah, who answered her ring at her
grandmother's door.

"I don't know, honey," whispered Hannah, ashy with fright. "They's
operatin' now. We thought she was going to die all day yesterday, but she
never give in to be operated on till Mr. Quin come."

"Where are Aunt Isobel and Aunt Enid?"

"They's all in the library. Mr. Ranny's there, too. Ain't nobody upstairs
with her but jest the doctors an' the nurse an' Mr. Quin."

Eleanor crept upstairs and sat down on the top step, outside that door
before which she had halted in dread so many times before. Remorse and
sympathy and acute apprehension struggled for mastery. All the old
antagonism for her grandmother was swept away in the dread prospect of
losing her. It was impossible to think of the family existing without
her. She held it up, kept it together, maintained the proud old Bartlett
tradition.

There was a sound behind the closed doors. Eleanor strained her ears to
listen. It was someone coughing, at first gently, then violently. The
next moment the door opened and a wild-eyed, unshaven figure staggered
into the hall.

"Damn that ether!" some one muttered.

And then, before Eleanor could get to her feet, Quinby Graham came
unsteadily toward her, stumbled twice, then pitched forward on his face,
striking his head on the banister as he fell.

CHAPTER 33

Two weeks later, when Quin struggled back to consciousness, he labored
under the delusion that he was still in the army and back in the camp
hospital. Eleanor, who scarcely left his bedside, was once more Miss
Bartlett, the ward visitor, and he was Patient Number 7. He tried to
explain to all those dim figures moving about the darkened room that he
was making her a bead chain, and unless they got him more beads he could
not finish it in time. When they reassured him and tried to get him to
take food, he invariably wanted to know if Miss Bartlett had brought it,
and which was her day to come again. Then the doctor and the nurse would
argue with him, and try to make him remember things he was sure had never
happened, and his mental distress would become acute. At such times
somebody, who of course could not be Miss Bartlett, but who had her voice
and eyes, would take his hand and tell him to go to sleep, then the
tang