“Of course I appreciate your leaving school in the middle of the term,” he told her.  “It’s good for mamma to have you here, and it’s fine for me, too, to have you look after me.  But I’m sorry you were so badly frightened that you thought it necessary.  You’ll have to pay up for this holiday, Missy.  I shall expect you to study all summer to make up lost time, so that you can catch up with your class and enter Sophomore with them next fall.”

To please him she brought out her books and studied awhile every day, reciting her French and Latin to her mother, and wrestling along with the others as best she could.  Then, too, it was impossible not to be affected to some extent by his spirit of hopefulness, and several times she gave herself up to the bliss of dreaming of the joyful thing it would be, if he should prove to be right and she could go back to Warwick Hall in the fall.  Then, one day the surgeons came up from Phoenix again and made their examination and experiments, and after that the lessons and the day-dreams stopped.  Everything stopped, it seemed.

They told him the truth because he would have nothing else, although they shrank from doing it until the last moment of their stay.  They knew it would be like giving him his death-blow.  Mary, standing in the door, saw the look of unspeakable horror that stole slowly over his face, then his helpless sinking back among the pillows, and the twitching of his hands as he clenched them convulsively.  Not a word or a groan escaped him, but the wild despair of his set face and staring eyes was more than she could endure.  She rushed out of the room and out of the house to the little loft above the woodshed, where no one could hear her frantic sobbing.  It was hours before she ventured back into the house.  It would only add to his misery to see her distress, she knew, so she left him to the little mother’s ministrations.

Anticipating such a result, the surgeons had brought several appliances to make his confinement less irksome.  There was a hammock arrangement with pulleys, by which he might be swung into different positions, and out into a wheeled chair.  They fastened the screws into walls and ceiling, put the apparatus in place and carefully tested it before leaving.  Then they were at the end of their skill.  They could do nothing more.  There was nothing that could be done.

Several times in the days that followed, the nurse spoke of the brave way in which Jack seemed to be meeting his fate.  But Mrs. Ware shook her head sadly.  She knew why no complaint escaped him.  She had seen him act the Spartan before to spare her.  Mary, too, knew what his persistent silence meant.  He was not always so careful to veil the suffering which showed through his eyes when he was alone with her.  She knew that half the time when he appeared to be listening to what she was reading, he was so absorbed in his bitter thoughts that he did not hear a word. “An eagle, broken-winged and drooping in a cage, he gloomed upon his lot and cursed the vital force within that would not let him die.”