“Good morning,” said he, smiling, as he saw her.  “Come in.  I want to talk to you.  But please don’t resume our old argument about the compromise, and about slavery and the rights of man.  You’ve been trying—­all these weeks when I’ve been down and helpless and couldn’t either fight or run away—­to make me be a Bentonite, or worse, an abolitionist—­trying, haven’t you? to make me an apostate, faithless to my state, my beliefs, my traditions—­and I suppose you’d be shrewd enough to add, faithless to my material interests.  Please don’t, this morning.  I don’t want subjective thought.  I don’t want algebra.  I don’t want history or law, or medicine.  I want—­”

She stood near the window, at some distance removed from him, even as she passed stopping to tidy Up a disarranged article on the tables here or there.  He smiled again at this.  “Where is Sally?” he asked.  “And how about your maid?”

“Some one must do these things,” she answered.  “Your servants need watching.  Sally is never where I can find her.  Jeanne I can always find—­but it is with her young man, Hector!”

He shook his head impatiently.  “It all comes on you—­work like this.  What could I have done without you?  But yourself, how are you coming on?  That arm of yours has pained me—­”

“It ceased to trouble me some time since.  The doctor says, too, that you’ll be quite well, soon.  That’s fine.”

He nodded.  “It’s wonderful, isn’t it?” said he.  “You did it.  Without you I’d be out there.”  He nodded toward the window, beyond which the grass-grown stones of the little family graveyard might be seen.  “You’re wonderful.”

He wheeled painfully toward her presently, “Listen.  We two are alone here, in spite of ourselves.  Face to face again, in spite of all, and well enough, now, both of us, to go back to our firing lines before long.  We have come closer together than many men and women get to be in a good many years; but we’re enemies, and apart, now.  At least you have seen me pretty much as I am—­a savage—­not much more.  I’ve seen you for what you are—­one woman out of hundreds, of thousands.  There isn’t going to be any woman in my life, after you.—­Would you mind handing me that paper, please?”

He passed the document to her opened.  “Here’s what I meant to do if I didn’t come through.  It wasn’t much.  But I am to pay; and if I had died, that was all I could pay.  That’s my last will and testament, my dear girl.  I have left you all I have.  It is a legal will.  There’ll never be any codicil.”

She looked at him straight.  “It is not valid,” she said.  “Surely you are not of sound mind!”

He looked about him at the room, for the first time in his memory immaculately neat.  From a distance there came the sound of a contented servant’s voice.  An air of rest and peace seemed in some way to be all about him.  He sighed.  “I never will be of sound mind again, I fear.