“You heard what the doctor said,” returned Mrs. Rivers cautiously.  At the same time she did not speak decidedly, and the frontiersman’s instinct of hospitality prevailed.  He knocked lightly; there was no response.  He turned the door handle softly.  The door opened.  A faint clean perfume—­an odor of some general personality rather than any particular thing—­stole out upon them.  The light of Seth’s candle struck a few glints from some cut-glass and silver, the contents of the guest’s dressing case, which had been carefully laid out upon a small table by his negro servant.  There was also a refined neatness in the disposition of his clothes and effects which struck the feminine eye of even the tidy Mrs. Rivers as something new to her experience.  Seth drew nearer the bed with his shaded candle, and then, turning, beckoned his wife to approach.  Mrs. Rivers hesitated—­but for the necessity of silence she would have openly protested—­but that protest was shut up in her compressed lips as she came forward.

For an instant that awe with which absolute helplessness invests the sleeping and dead was felt by both husband and wife.  Only the upper part of the sleeper’s face was visible above the bedclothes, held in position by a thin white nervous hand that was encircled at the wrist by a ruffle.  Seth stared.  Short brown curls were tumbled over a forehead damp with the dews of sleep and exhaustion.  But what appeared more singular, the closed eyes of this vessel of wrath and recklessness were fringed with lashes as long and silky as a woman’s.  Then Mrs. Rivers gently pulled her husband’s sleeve, and they both crept back with a greater sense of intrusion and even more cautiously than they had entered.  Nor did they speak until the door was closed softly and they were alone on the landing.  Seth looked grimly at his wife.

“Don’t look much ez ef he could hurt anybody.”

“He looks like a sick man,” returned Mrs. Rivers calmly.

The unconscious object of this criticism and attention slept until late; slept through the stir of awakened life within and without, through the challenge of early cocks in the lean-to shed, through the creaking of departing ox teams and the lazy, long-drawn commands of teamsters, through the regular strokes of the morning pump and the splash of water on stones, through the far-off barking of dogs and the half-intelligible shouts of ranchmen; slept through the sunlight on his ceiling, through its slow descent of his wall, and awoke with it in his eyes!  He woke, too, with a delicious sense of freedom from pain, and of even drawing a long breath without difficulty—­two facts so marvelous and dreamlike that he naturally closed his eyes again lest he should waken to a world of suffering and dyspnoea.  Satisfied at last that this relief was real, he again opened his eyes, but upon surroundings so strange, so wildly absurd and improbable, that he again doubted their reality.  He was lying in a moderately large room, primly and