"'What for?' he asks.
"'Just loving,' she answered.
"After that, we sat still for a long time. Insley came back with the medicine, and told me what to do if the sick man came to. Then he filled and lit the bracket lamp that seemed to make more shadows than light, and then he stopped beside Robin—as gentle as a woman over a plant—and asked her if she wanted anything. He come through the room several times, and once him and her smiled, for a still greeting, almost as children do. After a while he come with a little basket of food that he had had Abagail put up to the bakery, and we tried to eat a little something, all of us. And all the while the man on the bed lay like he was locked up in some new, thick kind of silence.
"When eight o'clock had gone, we heard what I had been expecting to hear—the first wheels and footsteps on the Plank Road directed towards Proudfit House. And Insley come in, and went over to Robin, and found Chris asleep in her arms, and he took him from her and laid him on the sagging Brussels couch.
"'You must go now,' he says to Robin, with his kind of still authority that wan't ordering nor schoolmastery, nor you-do-as-I-say, but was just something that made you want to mind him. 'I'll wake Chris and take him in at the least change—but you must go back at once.'
"And of course I was going to stay. Some of my minds was perfectly willing not to be at the party in any case, and anyhow the rest of them wanted to stay with Chris.
"Insley picked up some little belongings of hers, seeming to know them without being told, and because the time was so queer, and mebbe because death was in the next room, and mebbe for another reason or two, I could guess how, all the while he was answering her friendly questions about the little Cadoza boy—all that while the Personal, the Personal, like a living thing, hovered just beyond his words. And at last it just naturally came in and possessed what he was saying.
"'I can't thank you enough for coming down here,' he says. 'It's meant everything to Chris—and to me.'
"She glanced up at him with her pretty near boyish frankness, that had in it that night some new element of confidence and charm and just being dear.
"'Don't thank me,' she says, 'it was mine to do, too. And besides, I haven't done anything. And I'm running away!'