“I must go down and see Cherry, Fred. She took her husband to the old house; they were living there.”

“Helen will stay here,” the man assured him, quickly.  “I’ll drive you down and come back here.  We thought perhaps a few of us could come here to-morrow afternoon, Peter,” he added timidly, with his reddened eyes filling again, “and talk of her a little, and pray for her a little, and then take her to—­to rest beside the old doctor—­”

“I hadn’t thought about that,” Peter answered, still with the air of finding it hard to link words to thought.  “But that is the way she would like it.  Thank you—­and thank Helen for me—­”

“Oh, Peter, to do anything—­” the woman faltered.  “She came to us, you know, when the baby was so ill—­day after day—­my own sister couldn’t have been more to us!”

“Did she?” Peter asked, staring at the speaker steadily.  “That was like her.”

He went out of the house and got into a waiting car, and they drove down the mountain.  Alix had driven him over this road day before yesterday—­yesterday—­no, it was today, he remembered.

“Thank God I don’t feel it yet as I shall feel it, Thompson!” he said, quietly.  The man who was driving gave him an anxious glance.

“You must take each day as it comes,” he answered, simply.

Peter nodded, folded his arms across his chest, and stared into the early dark.  There was no other way to go than past the very spot where the horror had occurred, but Thompson told his wife later that poor Joyce had not seemed to know it when they passed it.  Nor did he give any evidence of emotion when they reached the old Strickland house and entered the old hallway where Cherry had come flying in, a few short years ago, with Martin’s first kiss upon her lips.

Two doctors, summoned from San Francisco, were here, and two nurses.  Martin had been laid upon a hastily moved bed in the old study, to be spared the narrow stairs.  The room was metamorphosed, the whole house moved about it as about a pivot, and there was no thought but for the man who lay, sometimes moaning and sometimes ominously still, waiting for death.

“He cannot live!” whispered Cherry, ghastly of face, and with the utter chaos of her soul and brain expressed by her tumbled frock and the carelessly pushed back and knotted masses of her hair.  “His arm is broken, Peter, and his leg crushed—­they don’t dare touch him!  And the surgeon says the spine, too—­and you see his head!  Oh, God! it is so terrible,” she said in agony, through shut teeth, knotting her hands together, “it is too terrible that he is breathing now, that life is there now, and that they cannot hold it!”

She led Peter into the sitting room, where the doctors were waiting.  The nurses came and went; the lamps had been lighted.  Both the physicians rose as Peter came in, and he knew that they had been told that this was the man whose wife had been killed that day.  Their manner expressed the sympathy they did not voice.  Peter sat down with them.