In the Border Country | Page 9

a rock, broken at the gable angle, dear."
Then she faced me, herself perfectly.
"Oh, you think so?" she answered me with a smile.
The words were strange enough in themselves, but without them her
manner would have taught me that she was going to speak of stranger

things yet, and I was not disappointed.
"It was just such a day as this," she began, "and the smell of the apples
always takes me back, though never as strongly as now. We were in the
orchard ... ah, my dear, you will tell it wonderfully well when I have
told you, and many will learn as I have learned, but you can never
make them see the Dame as I saw her!"
Then she told me the tale of that adventure.
* * * * *
"What you need," said her friend, the great physician, "is change.
Change and rest. Where can you go and be sure of absolute quiet?"
"I cannot tell you," she said wearily, "there is always something that I
must do----"
"----or think that you must do," he interrupted her.
"It is all the same," she said.
He sighed, and looked at her quietly for a long time.
"It has taken me fifty years to learn that, my dear child," said he, "and
you toss it at me in a moment's talk. Since you have learned it, why are
you not well and happy?"
"Since I have learned it, I can never be," she told him, and again he
looked long at her.
"What is that that you are trying to do?" he asked her at last. "Think
carefully and tell me in one sentence."
"I have already thought carefully," she said, "and I can tell you. I am
trying to live my husband's life, which I ought not to give up, my
children's life, which I must not give up, and my own life, which I
cannot give up."

He looked even longer than before at her and the late sun slipped down
the polished fittings of his desk and down the gilded covers of the
book-filled shelves behind him. Longer than before he looked and the
lines deepened in his face and his eyes seemed to grow deeper in his
head as she looked back at him. At last he spoke.
"My child," he said, "if I were a poor and hungry doctor it is not to be
doubted that I should give you something in a bottle and tell you to
come to me again. But I am a wealthy physician and I can afford to tell
you truth. I can do nothing for you. You must cure yourself, or fail to
do it so completely that I shall be needed to enable you to fail again.
When you have repeated this last process sufficiently, I shall no longer
be thus enabled and you will die. That is all."
"Die?" said she; "I shall die?"
"You will die," he said, "with everything that the world calls good
fortune in your lap. With no excuse for doing so, but with every reason
to be glad that you are doing so. Leaving behind you someone who
needed you and more whom you needed. Now go home and think, and
before you go, drink this."
Silently he poured out for her a tiny glassful of some colourless,
aromatic liquid and in silence she drank it and left the room, where the
dying sun glinted upon the gilded books. It seemed to her that he
touched a bell on the desk with his hand, and though the cordial had
already begun to affect her head strangely, she was able to observe that
it was in answer to this bell that his office nurse appeared at the door as
she reached it and put a steadying arm behind her.
"Come this way," said the nurse, "and sit a moment; do you feel a little
dizzy?"
"A little," she answered, and her voice seemed to come from far away;
"I am afraid that drink was stronger than it should have been ... if I
could sit down ... the doctor...."
She knew that the nurse was helping her to a couch in a tiny room she

had never been in before; she knew that she sank upon it and that the
nurse settled her upon a bright crimson cushion; she heard her soothing
murmur and nodded to show that she was not alarmed, only vexed at
her own weakness, and then she ceased to struggle with the
overwhelming drowsiness that oppressed her, and slept.
When she woke it was dark in the room. In the street the electric lights
glowed, and the people passed steadily by the window; was it midnight,
she wondered, or only early dusk? How strange that the doctor