She shook her head, resisting.

“I beg you to,” pleaded Jack, and, though she could not understand him, she knew what he was saying, and still resisted.

“Come,” he said, gently, and put his hands upon her shoulders. “See, he sleeps now. It is well, and you will be too weak and faint to minister to him when he awakes, otherwise.”

But she protested that her health was excellent; that she would not leave her son. He stooped down, and attempted to raise her gently to her feet, but she would not permit him.

He saw the tired droop of the eyes. “She will fall asleep soon,” he said to himself, and so sat down beside her, putting his arm about her and pillowing her head on his shoulder. She did not restrain him. She looked gratefully into the frank, inviting eyes. She sighed, her head wavered and dropped. The room was very still and silent. Gradually the woman fell asleep, and as she slept she sighed from ineffable weariness.

Jack looked towards the silent figure on the bed. The grayness of the approaching night gave the face an expression that was sinister in the extreme. He shuddered and averted his face. The little form in his arms grew heavier.

“She will rest better lying down,” he thought, and carried her into the adjoining room and laid her softly down. Then he took the lighted andon, and, carrying it into the sick-room, set it in a corner near the bed, and drew down the shutters. After this, he went back to the bed, and stood for a minute looking down on the sleeping man, an expression of infinite sadness on his face. Taro stirred, the hand lying outside the coverlet contracted, then closed spasmodically; the expression of the face became terrifying. He moaned. It seemed to Jack as if the sleeping man was haunted by a terrible nightmare which robbed him of the rest that should have found him.

And it was with Taro as Jack had thought. He was in the midst of a fever dream—a nightmare. He thought his little sister, Snowflake, knelt by his bedside and soothed and ministered to his wants. He felt rested and at peace at last; but, alas! just as he was slipping into happy oblivion a dark form loomed up beside his sister, bent over, and clutched at her. She struggled wildly at first, then weakly; finally her struggles ceased, and she lay very still and white. The man lifted her up and carried her away. After a time he came back, and now Taro felt his breath on his own face. He was bending over him. In a dim haze he saw the face, and recognized it as that of his friend, Jack Bigelow! He tried to reach out and grasp him, to strike and kill him, but he was at the mercy of some invisible power which benumbed him and held him down. His limbs refused to move, he was unable to lift so much as a finger, stir an eyelash, and all the time the man’s breath was on his face, stealing into his nostrils and suffocating him.

Jack noted the gasping of his friend with alarm, and stooped over for the purpose of removing the pillow to give him relief. But at the touch of his hand, as he attempted to raise the head on the pillow, the life blood started vividly, madly, through the man on the bed, and suddenly he had sprung into wild life. Jack saw the terrible gleam of two delirious eyes, and stood magnetized. With lightning fury the raving man had thrown aside the bedclothes, sprung from the bed, and thrown himself on the other with such force that the two came to the ground together, the madman on top.

“I have you now!—traitor! betrayer!” he said, as his hands felt Jack’s warm throat.