“D-doctor?” said Jethro, at last.

The doctor turned again:  “Yes?” he said.

“D-doctor—­if Wetherell hadn’t b’en to the capital would he have lived—­if he hadn’t been to the capital?”

“My friend,” said Dr. Coles, “if Mr. Wetherell had always lived in a warm house, and had always been well fed, and helped over the rough places and shielded from the storms, he might have lived longer.  It is a marvel to me that he has lived so long.”

And then the doctor went way, back to Boston.  Many times in his long professional life had the veil been lifted for him—­a little.  But as he sat in the train he said to himself that in this visit to the hamlet of Coniston he had had the strangest glimpse of all.  William Wetherell rallied, as Dr. Coles had predicted, from that first sharp attack, and one morning they brought up a reclining chair which belonged to Mr. Satterlee, the minister, and set it in the window.  There, in the still days of the early autumn, Wetherell looked down upon the garden he had grown to love, and listened to the song of Coniston Water.  There Cynthia, who had scarcely left his side, read to him from Keats and Shelley and Tennyson—­yet the thought grew on her that he did not seem to hear.  Even that wonderful passage of Milton’s, beginning “So sinks the day-star in the ocean bed,” which he always used to beg her to repeat, did not seem to move him now.

The neighbors came and sat with him, but he would not often speak.  Cheery Lem Hallowell and his wife, and Cousin Ephraim, to talk about the war, hobbling slowly up the stairs—­for rheumatism had been added to that trouble of the Wilderness bullet now, and Ephraim was getting along in years; and Rias Richardson stole up in his carpet slippers; and Moses, after his chores were done, and Amandy with her cakes and delicacies, which he left untouched—­though Amandy never knew it.  Yes, and Jethro came.  Day by day he would come silently into the room, and sit silently for a space, and go as silently out of it.  The farms were neglected now on Thousand Acre Hill.  William Wetherell would take his hand, and speak to him, but do no more than that.

There were times when Cynthia leaned over him, listening as he breathed to know whether he slept or were awake.  If he were not sleeping, he would speak her name:  he repeated it often in those days, as though the sound of it gave him comfort; and he would fall asleep with it on his lips, holding her hand, and thinking, perhaps, of that other Cynthia who had tended and nursed and shielded him in other days.  Then she would steal down the stairs to Jethro on the doorstep:  to Jethro who would sit there for hours at a time, to the wonder and awe of his neighbors.  Although they knew that he loved the storekeeper as he loved no other man, his was a grief that they could not understand.

Cynthia used to go to Jethro in the garden.  Sorrow had brought them very near together; and though she had loved him before, now he had become her reliance and her refuge.  The first time Cynthia saw him; when the worst of the illness had passed and the strange and terrifying apathy had come, she had hidden her head on his shoulder and wept there.  Jethro kept that coat, with the tear stains on it, to his dying day, and never wore it again.