he wanted to
see should be telegraphed for forthwith. The one thing she had to bear
in mind was that she was to be happy and not bother about things; leave
everything to him.

This plan was carried out, and in a paradise, made up of blue sea, white
sands, warm sun and Rodney--Rodney always there, and queerly content to
drowse away the time with her, she almost forgot the great dam and the
pressure of the waters that had mounted up behind it. Was it an
obsession just as Rodney said? Would she find when it was all over and
she rallied herself for the great endeavor, that there was, after all,
no battle to be fought--nothing but a baby at her breast?

CHAPTER XIII

FATE PLAYS A JOKE

Traveling bars flowing along parallel, black and white; the white ones
incandescent;--and a small helpless harried thing struggling to keep in
the shadow of the black ones, or to regain it again across the pitiless
zone of white that the little helpless thing called pain.--Traveling
bars flowing along endlessly.

And then a great ball whirling in planetary space, half dark, half
incandescent white, having for its sole inhabitant, the small harried
thing that struggled to keep in the dark out of the glare of that
pitiless white pain.--One watched its struggles from a long way
off--like God.--But the ball whirled drunkenly and it made one sick to
look.--And then a supervening chaos--no longer a ball but still
whirling, reeling, tottering. Rectangles of light, which, had they kept
still, would have been windows--a mirror.

And then, very fine and small and weak, something that knew it was Rose
Stanton--Rose Stanton lying in a bed with people about her. She let her
eyes fall heavily shut again lest they should discover she was there and
want her to speak or think.

The bars came back, but the whiteness of them was no longer so white,
and slowly they faded out. Then, for a long time, nothing. Then sounds,
movements--soft, skilful, disciplined sounds and movements. And,
presently, a hand--a firm powerful hand, that picked up and supported a
heavy limp wrist--Rose Stanton's wrist--and two sensitive finger-tips
that rested lightly on the upper surface of it. After that, an even
measured voice--a voice of authority, whose words no doubt made sense,
only Rose was too tired to think what the sense was:

"She's out of the ether now, practically. That's a splendid pulse.
She's doing the best thing she can, sleeping like that. It's been a