The next few days were terrible, in the house and on the farm. Indoors the women nursed Harry, and outdoors Reuben did double work, sleeping at night in an arm-chair by his brother\'s side.

Harry had recovered consciousness, but it could not be said that he had "come to himself." "Beautiful Harry," with all his hopes and ardours, his dreams and sensibilities, had run away like a gipsy, and in his place was a new Harry, blind and mad, who moaned and laughed, with stony silences, and now and then strange fits of struggling as if the runaway gipsy strove to come back.

Dr. Espinette refused to say whether this state was permanent or merely temporary. Neither could he be sure whether it was due to his injuries or to the shock[Pg 50] of finding himself blind. Reuben felt practically convinced that his brother was sane during the few moments he had spoken to him alone, but the doctor seemed doubtful.

Reuben was glad to escape into his farm work. The atmosphere of sickness was like a cloud, which grew blacker and blacker the nearer one came to its heart. Its heart was that little room in the gable, where he spent those wretched nights, disturbed by Harry\'s moaning. Out of doors, in the yard or the cowshed or the stable, he breathed a cleaner atmosphere. The heaviness, the vague remorse, grew lighter. And strange to say, out on Boarzell, which was the cause of his trouble, they grew lightest of all.

Somehow out there was a wider life, a life which took no reck of sickness or horror or self-reproach. The wind which stung his face and roughed his hair, the sun which tanned his nape as he bent to his work, the smell of the earth after rain, the mists that brewed in the hollows at dusk, and at dawn slunk like spirits up to the clouds ... they were all part of something too great to take count of human pain—so much greater than he that in it he could forget his trouble, and find ease and hope and purpose—even though he was fighting it.

He mildly scandalised his neighbours by blasting—privately this time—the tree stumps yet in the ground. According to their ethics he should have accepted Harry\'s accident as the voice of Providence and abstained from his outlandish methods—also some felt that it ............