. . And I honestly believe I pulled him back each time by main strength and determination--do you know what I mean?" she said hoarsely and eagerly--"I was just determined not to let him go. If his heart had stopped beating I believe I could have done something to make it start again--I'd have stood over him and blown my breath into him--got my blood into him--shook him," she said with a powerful, nervous movement of her big hands--"anything just to keep him alive."

"She's--she's--saved his life--time after time," said Barton slowly, flicking his cigar ash carefully away, and looking down deeply, searching for a word.

"He'd--he'd--have been a dead man long ago--if it hadn't been for her."

"Yeah--I know she has," George Pentland drawled agreeably. "I know you've sure stuck by Uncle Will--I guess he knows it, too."

"It's not that I mind it, George--you know what I mean?" she said eagerly. "Good heavens! I believe I could give away a dozen lives if I thought it was going to save his life! . . . But it's the strain of it. . . . Month after month . . . year after year . . . lying awake at night wondering if he's all right over there in that back room in Mama's house--wondering if he's keeping warm in that old cold house--"

"Why, no, child," the older woman said hastily. "I kept a good fire burnin' in that room all last winter--that was the warmest room in the whole place--there wasn't a warmer--"

But immediately she was engulfed, swept aside, obliterated in the flood-tide of the other's speech.

"--Wondering if he's sick or needs me--if he's begun to bleed again--oh! George, it makes me sick to think about it--that poor old man left there all alone, rotting away with that awful cancer, with that horrible smell about him all the time--everything he wears gets simply stiff with that rotten corrupt matter--Do you know what it is to wait, wait, wait, year after year, and year after year, never knowing when he's going to die, to have him hang on by a thread until it seems you've lived forever--that there'll never be an end--that you'll never have a chance to live your own life--to have a moment's peace or rest or happiness yourself? My God, does it always have to be this way? . . . Can I never have a moment's happiness? . . . Must they always come to me? Does everything have to be put on my shoulders? . . . Will you tell me that?" Her voice had risen to a note of frenzied despair. She was glaring at her cousin with a look of desperate and frantic entreaty, her whole gaunt figure tense and strained with the stress of her hysteria.

"That's--that's the trouble now," said Barton, looking down and searching for the word. "She's .