"I had a cousin who had a cough like yours,"--brave now that she
could not go back--"and he went down to New Mexico and stayed for a
year, and when he came back--when he came back he was as well as any
of us. It seems so foolish not to"--her voice broke, now that it had
so valiantly carried it--"not to--"

He looked at her, and that was all. But she was never wholly the
same again after that look. It enveloped her being in a something
which left her richer--different. It was a look to light the dark
place between two human souls. It seemed for the moment that words
would follow it, but as if feeling their helplessness--perhaps
needlessness--they sank back unuttered, and at the last he got up,
abruptly, and walked away.

One night, while waiting for the elevator, she heard two of the men
talking about him. When she went out on the street it was with head
high, cheeks hot. For nothing is so hard to hear as that which one
has half known, and evaded. One never denies so hotly as in denying
to one's self what one fears is true, and one never resents so
bitterly as in resenting that which one cannot say one has the right
to resent.

That night she lay in her bed with wide open eyes, going over and
over the things they had said. "_Cure?_"--one of them had
scoffed, after telling how brilliant he had been before he "went to
pieces"--"why all the cures on earth couldn't help him! He can go
just so far, and then he can no more stop himself--oh, about as much
as an ant could stop a prairie fire!"

She finally turned over on her pillow and sobbed; and she wondered