"Even with them all against me, Tom, I've stuck to it--to what I feel is
my right. This is my home--and it's Jim's home--and the children's as
well as it's mine--and, in a way, it's--inviolate. I've sworn that
nothing ugly shall come into it--nothing shall ruin it--the way our
lives were ruined out there!"
Her voice trembled, but her eyes, as she turned to me at the last, were
steady.
"I'll send something, of course," she said; "you will take it to them.
But I'll--not go."
With her message and her money I sought out Lin Darton and Miss Etta,
and together we rambled in their open Ford along those flat, dead
Illinois roads that I had not seen for so long.
It is a doctor's profession to save life, and there was a life to be
saved, if it were possible. But he was nearer to the end than I had
thought. Grega was there in that same barren room of the mill-house,
doing things in a stolid, undeft sort of way. The bed had been pulled
near the stove and the room was stuffier, more untidy than in the days
when Lisbeth had been there. The creaky bed, the unvarnished walls, and
the rusty alarm clock, that ticked insistently, all added to the sense
of flaccidity. The afternoon was late and already dark; sagging clouds
had gathered, shutting out what was left of the daylight.
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