“You sha’n’t go to the house, I say!” Faxon furiously redoubled his blows, and at length steps sounded on the stairs.  Rainer was leaning against the lintel, and as the door opened the light from the hall flashed on his pale face and fixed eyes.  Faxon caught him by the arm and drew him in.

“It was cold out there,” he sighed; and then, abruptly, as if invisible shears at a single stroke had cut every muscle in his body, he swerved, drooped on Faxon’s arm, and seemed to sink into nothing at his feet.

The lodge-keeper and Faxon bent over him, and somehow, between them, lifted him into the kitchen and laid him on a sofa by the stove.

The lodge-keeper, stammering:  “I’ll ring up the house,” dashed out of the room.  But Faxon heard the words without heeding them:  omens mattered nothing now, beside this woe fulfilled.  He knelt down to undo the fur collar about Rainer’s throat, and as he did so he felt a warm moisture on his hands.  He held them up, and they were red. ...

V

The palms threaded their endless line along the yellow river.  The little steamer lay at the wharf, and George Faxon, sitting in the veranda of the wooden hotel, idly watched the coolies carrying the freight across the gang-plank.

He had been looking at such scenes for two months.  Nearly five had elapsed since he had descended from the train at Northridge and strained his eyes for the sleigh that was to take him to Weymore:  Weymore, which he was never to behold! ...  Part of the interval—­ the first part—­was still a great gray blur.  Even now he could not be quite sure how he had got back to Boston, reached the house of a cousin, and been thence transferred to a quiet room looking out on snow under bare trees.  He looked out a long time at the same scene, and finally one day a man he had known at Harvard came to see him and invited him to go out on a business trip to the Malay Peninsula.

“You’ve had a bad shake-up, and it’ll do you no end of good to get away from things.”

When the doctor came the next day it turned out that he knew of the plan and approved it.  “You ought to be quiet for a year.  Just loaf and look at the landscape,” he advised.

Faxon felt the first faint stirrings of curiosity.

“What’s been the matter with me, anyhow?”

“Well, over-work, I suppose.  You must have been bottling up for a bad breakdown before you started for New Hampshire last December.  And the shock of that poor boy’s death did the rest.”

Ah, yes—­Rainer had died.  He remembered. ...