you!"

"You're out of your head. Once for all--no!" she replied, firmly.

"You--you--" His voice failed in a terrible whisper. ...

In the succeeding days Kells did not often speak. His recovery was
slow--a matter of doubt. Nothing was any plainer than the fact that
if Joan had left him he would not have lived long. She knew it. And
he knew it. When he was awake, and she came to him, a mournful and
beautiful smile lit his eyes. The sight of her apparently hurt him
and uplifted him. But he slept twenty hours out of every day, and
while he slept he did not need Joan.

She came to know the meaning of solitude. There were days when she
did not hear the sound of her own voice. A habit of silence, one of
the significant forces of solitude, had grown upon her. Daily she
thought less and felt more. For hours she did nothing. When she
roused herself, compelled herself to think of these encompassing
peaks of the lonely canon walls, the stately trees, all those
eternally silent and changless features of her solitude, she hated
them with a blind and unreasoning passion. She hated them because
she was losing her love for them, because they were becoming a part
of her, because they were fixed and content and passionless. She
liked to sit in the sun, feel its warmth, see its brightness; and
sometimes she almost forgot to go back to her patient. She fought at
times against an insidious change--a growing older--a going
backward; at other times she drifted through hours that seemed quiet
and golden, in which nothing happened. And by and by when she
realized that the drifting hours were gradually swallowing up the