But the fact lay there to contradict them.

Prometheus stole fire from heaven and paid it back to an eternal death.  The old cattleman was refusing his payment.  It was no state of coma in which he lay; it was no prolonged trance.  He was vitally, vividly alive; he was concentrating with a bitter and exhausting vigour day and night, and fighting a battle the more terrible because it was fought in silence, a battle in which he could receive no aid, no reinforcement, a battle in which he could not win, but in which he might delay defeat.

Ay, the wise men would smile and shake their heads when he presented this case to their consideration, but he would make his account so accurate and particular and so well witnessed that they would have to admit the truth of all he said.  And science, which proclaimed that matter was indestructible and that the mind was matter and that the brain needed nourishment like any other muscle—­science would have to hang the head and wonder!

The eyes of the girl brought him to halt in his pacing, and he stopped, confronting her.  His excitement had transformed him.  His nostrils were quivering, his eyes were pointed with light, his head was high, and he breathed fast.  He was flushed as the Roman Conqueror.  And his excitement tinged the girl, also, with colour.

She offered to take him to his room as soon as he wished to go.  He was quite willing.  He wanted to be alone, to think.  But when he followed her she stopped him in the hall.  Buck Daniels lumbered slowly after them in a clumsy attempt at sauntering.

“Well?” asked Kate Cumberland.

She had thrown a blue mantle over her shoulders when she entered the house, and the touch of boyish self-confidence which had been hers on the ride was gone.  In its place there was something even more difficult for Randall Byrne to face.  If there had been a garish brightness about her when he had first seen her, the brilliancy of a mirror playing in the sun against his feeble eyes, there was now a blending of pastel shades, for the hall was dimly illumined and the shadow tarnished her hair and her pallor was like cold stone; even her eyes were misted by fear.  Yet a vital sense of her nearness swept upon Byrne, and he felt as if he were surrounded—­by a danger.

“Opinions,” said the doctor, “based on so summary an examination are necessarily inexact, yet the value of a first impression is not negligible.  The best I can say is that there is probably no immediate danger, but Mr. Cumberland is seriously ill.  Furthermore, it is not old age.”

He would not say all he thought; it was not yet time.

She winced and clasped her hands tightly together.  She was like a child about to be punished for a crime it has not committed, and it came vaguely to the doctor that he might have broached his ill tidings more gently.

He added:  “I must have further opportunities for observance before I give a detailed opinion and suggest a treatment.”