The Web of Life

n?" the doctor

unlocked the cottage door. They entered a large room, from which some narrow stairs led to the chambers above. Floor and walls were bare, and the only furniture consisted of two wooden chairs,

you the main thing b

mmers replied gently. "I probabl

had seen her that night at the hospital. He read her, somehow, extraordinarily well; he knew the misery, the longing, the anger, the hate, the stubborn power to fight. Her deep eyes glanced at him frankly, willing to be read by t

t sometime I want to tell you things-

. Then he took a chair to the window and sat down. She was very real to him, this woman, and compelling, with her silences, her broken phrases. Rarely, ver

you co

were those of a large woman. Her hair, bronzed in the sunlight as he remembered, was dark in the gloom of this room. The plain, symmetrical arrangement of the hair above the large brow and features m

talkative, a

shed, yet in comparison with the room below it seemed almost luxurious. Two windows gave a clear view above the little oak copse, the lines of empty freight cars on the siding, and a mile of low meadow that lay between the cottage a

d had grown rankly, was puffy with convalescent fat. His hands that drummed idly against the couch were white and flab

. "Mrs. Preston keeps me a close prisoner.

sly, as Sommers shoo

hile you are sick. They like

octor, being a man, would appreciate the poin

n out there, who comes in from his ranch two hundred miles to see me. He is a fine fellow, strapping, big six-footer. He knows how to put in his time day and night, when he g

ral attempts to interrupt his aimless, wandering talk; but he started again each time, excited by the presence of the doctor. His mind was like a bag of loosely associated ideas. Any jar seemed to set loose a long line of reminiscences, very vague

a pint a day, and I haven't had a drop for four weeks. Your Chicago whiskey is rotten bad, though, I tell you. I just stepped into a place to get a drink with Joe Campbell-his father own

aimed, "Do you wa

you, Mr. Preston, and I will leave som

his interest, doctor. I am gl

g at the evidences of forgotten breedin

ope we shall meet again

Preston lit a lamp. After some minutes Somm

t college; he was taken

he tells when he

tor exclaimed

was away so much of the time, and he was very different then-I mean he didn't ra

turned hi

didn't seem to care. But he was away most of the time, travelling, going from place t

ime?" the d

ps, as if there were thi

o New York, and I found him with another woman, living in a hotel not a mile from our home. I don't know why I should have made so much of that.

idently as obvious, typical, useless. She tried to select si

ead and alive. I thought of getting a divorce, of finding some country school in another state. Dr. Leonard urged me to. I might have-I don't know. But accidentally he was brought back. I was going home from a teacher

ctor nodded sympathetically. It was a fatal moment, the point

n mine. After all, the divorce would have made no difference; it

relatives?"

keep him away from them; that would give him the best chance to kill himself-going about everywhere, always travelling, always with

mpetent heart, to take charge of this flotsam. That w

she added, as for excu

little in the depths of her heart? That was an irritating trait of feminine stupidity. But one intelligent glance

t will you d

at now. Finally she exclaime

st and get well. And that may go on and on until one of us dies, or I am discharged. As I to

tuation; that she expected no relief from th

in. We will see w

t man, and he knew it. She knew it also. She smiled mournfully as they

you call it? There is no

: "Brain trouble. In his case a kind of decay of the tissue; perhaps inherite

n obedience to the cowardly rules of that profession. He had saved life-animation-to this mass of corruption. Except for his skill, thi

the history of the case is a bad one. He will have to be sent away to an institution if-; but the only thin

he patient might have convulsions, paralysis, locomotor ataxia, mere imbecility with normal physical functions, or in

turned in his saddle to look once more at the cottage. One light gleamed from the room he had just left. He could see the outline of the woman's form standing by the open window. The place was lonely and forbidding enough, isolated and withdrawn as the life of the woman within it. She was set apart with the thing that had been man stretched out above in stupor,

cute for her this decree of fate, to

nd belched flame, and silently closed again. A rosy vapor, as from some Tartarean breathing, hovered about the mouths of the furnaces. Moment by moment these mouths opened and belched and closed. It was the fiery respiration of a gigan