“Tragic!” cried Gaylord, starting up in his seat, “my God, nobody will ever know how tragic!  It’s a tragedy I live with and eat with and sleep with, until I’ve lost my grip on everything.  You see she had made a good bit of money, but she spent it all going to health resorts.  It’s her lungs.  I’ve got money enough to send her anywhere, but the doctors all say it’s no use.  She hasn’t the ghost of a chance.  It’s just getting through the days now.  I had no notion she was half so bad before she came to me.  She just wrote that she was run down.  Now that she’s here, I think she’d be happier anywhere under the sun, but she won’t leave.  She says it’s easier to let go of life here.  There was a time when I was a brakeman with a run out of Bird City, Iowa, and she was a little thing I could carry on my shoulder, when I could get her everything on earth she wanted, and she hadn’t a wish my $80 a month didn’t cover; and now, when I’ve got a little property together, I can’t buy her a night’s sleep!”

Everett saw that, whatever Charley Gaylord’s present status in the world might be, he had brought the brakeman’s heart up the ladder with him.

The reins slackened in Gaylord’s hand as they drew up before a showily painted house with many gables and a round tower.  “Here we are,” he said, turning to Everett, “and I guess we understand each other.”

They were met at the door by a thin, colourless woman, whom Gaylord introduced as “My sister, Maggie.”  She asked her brother to show Mr. Hilgarde into the music-room, where Katharine would join him.

When Everett entered the music-room he gave a little start of surprise, feeling that he had stepped from the glaring Wyoming sunlight into some New York studio that he had always known.  He looked incredulously out of the window at the grey plain that ended in the great upheaval of the Rockies.

The haunting air of familiarity perplexed him.  Suddenly his eye fell upon a large photograph of his brother above the piano.  Then it all became clear enough:  this was veritably his brother’s room.  If it were not an exact copy of one of the many studios that Adriance had fitted up in various parts of the world, wearying of them and leaving almost before the renovator’s varnish had dried, it was at least in the same tone.  In every detail Adriance’s taste was so manifest that the room seemed to exhale his personality.

Among the photographs on the wall there was one of Katharine Gaylord, taken in the days when Everett had known her, and when the flash of her eye or the flutter of her skirt was enough to set his boyish heart in a tumult.  Even now, he stood before the portrait with a certain degree of embarrassment.  It was the face of a woman already old in her first youth, a trifle hard, and it told of what her brother had called her fight.  The camaraderie of her frank, confident eyes was qualified by the deep lines about her mouth and the curve of the lips, which was both sad and cynical.  Certainly she had more good-will than confidence toward the world.  The chief charm of the woman, as Everett had known her, lay in her superb figure and in her eyes, which possessed a warm, life-giving quality like the sunlight; eyes which glowed with a perpetual salutat to the world.