e terror of death that, his office people say, was always with him,
rose to call for help. In the dark hall, feeling for an electric-light
switch, he must have lost his way, for he fell down the hard oak
stairs. It was never known how long he lay there unable to move one-half
of his body, but his wife stood nearly an hour at the front door that
night, and when she finally switched on the light, she and the man with
her saw Markley lying before them with one eye shut and with half his
face withered and dead, the other half around the open eye quivering
with hate. He choked on an oath, and shook at her a gnarled bare arm.
Her face was flushed, and her tongue was unsure, but she laughed a
shrill, wicked laugh and cried: "Ah, you old goat; don't you double your
fist at me!"

Whereupon she shuddered away from the shaking figure at her feet and
scurried upstairs. And the man standing in the doorway, wondering what
the old man had heard, wakened the house, and helped to carry John
Markley upstairs to his bed.

It was nearly three months before he could be wheeled to his office,
where he still sits every day, spinning his golden web and filling his
soul with poison. They say that, helpless as he is, he may live for a
score of years. Isabel Markley knows how old she will be then. A
thousand times she has counted it.

To see our town of a summer twilight, with the families riding abroad
behind their good old nags, under the overhanging elms that meet above
our newly-paved streets, one would not think that there could exist in
so lovely a place as miserable a creature as John Markley is; or as
Isabel, his wife, for that matter. The town--out beyond Main Street,
which is always dreary and ugly with tin gorgons on the cornices--the
town is a great grove springing from a bluegrass sod, with porch boxes
making flecks of colour among the vines; cannas and elephant ears and
foliage plants rise from the wide lawns; and children bloom like moving
flowers all through the picture.

There are certain streets, like the one past the Markley mansion, upon
which we make it a point always to drive with our visitors--show streets
we may as well frankly call them--and one of these leads down a wide,
handsome street out to the college. There the town often goes in its
best bib and tucker to hear the lecturers whom Mrs. Markley feeds. Last
winter one came who converted Dan Gregg--once Governor, but for ten
years best known among us as the town in