I could bear no longer the city, the Club, the office, the daily contact with my associates and clients.  Six hours distant, near Rossiter, was a small resort in the mountains of which I had heard.  I telegraphed Nancy to address me there, notified the office, packed my bag, and waited impatiently for midday, when I boarded the train.  At seven I reached a little station where a stage was waiting to take me to Callender’s Mill.

It was not until morning that I beheld my retreat, when little wisps of vapour were straying over the surface of the lake, and the steep green slopes that rose out of the water on the western side were still in shadow.  The hotel, a much overgrown and altered farm-house, stood, surrounded by great trees, in an ancient clearing that sloped gently to the water’s edge, where an old-fashioned, octagonal summerhouse overlooked a landing for rowboats.  The resort, indeed, was a survival of simpler times....

In spite of the thirty-odd guests, people of very moderate incomes who knew the place and had come here year after year, I was as much alone as if I had been the only sojourner.  The place was so remote, so peaceful in contrast to the city I had left, which had become intolerable.  And at night, during hours of wakefulness, the music of the waters falling over the dam was soothing.  I used to walk down there and sit on the stones of the ruined mill; or climb to the crests on the far side of the pond to gaze for hours westward where the green billows of the Alleghenies lost themselves in the haze.  I had discovered a new country; here, when our trials should be over, I would bring Nancy, and I found distraction in choosing sites for a bungalow.  In my soul hope flowered with little watering.  Uncertain news was good news.  After two days of an impatience all but intolerable, her first letter arrived, I learned that the specialists had not been able to make a diagnosis, and I began to take heart again.  At times, she said, Ham was delirious and difficult to manage; at other times he sank into a condition of coma; and again he seemed to know her and Ralph, who had come up from Southampton, where he had been spending the summer.  One doctor thought that Ham’s remarkable vitality would pull him through, in spite of what his life had been.  The shock—­as might have been surmised—­had affected the brain....  The letters that followed contained no additional news; she did not dwell on the depressing reactions inevitable from the situation in which she found herself—­one so much worse than mine; she expressed a continual longing for me; and yet I had trouble to convince myself that they did not lack the note of reassurance for which I strained as I eagerly scanned them—­of reassurance that she had no intention of permitting her husband’s condition to interfere with that ultimate happiness on which it seemed my existence depended.  I tried to account for the absence of this note by reflecting that the letters were of necessity