When morning came she refused to touch the milk he had warmed, and lay tossing and coughing in parched misery. What was it? Bronchitis? His heart sank: what was it people did for bronchitis? There was no telephone, and no nearby neighbour except an old deaf woman who would probably not be of much use—even if Vance could absent himself long enough to summon her. He decided to run across to the deaf woman's house, and bribe her grandson, a lazy fellow who was not on good terms with Mrs. Tracy, to bicycle to Paul's Landing for a doctor; but whenever he tried to creep out of the room his shoes creaked or a board cried, and Laura Lou started up. "Don't leave me, Vanny—you mustn't leave me … " and the heavy hours dragged on … Vance rummaged out an old bottle of cough mixture, and gave her some; but it did not relieve her, and the hands she wound about his neck grew drier and more burning. It was as if the fever were visibly consuming her, so small and shrunken had her restless body become. As he sat there and watched it was her turn to become a stranger: this haggard changeling was not the tender creature whom he loved. This discovery of the frail limits of personality, of the transformation of what seemed closest and most fixed in the flux of life, dragged his brain down into a labyrinth of conjecture. What was she, this being so beloved and so unknown? Something in her craved for him and clung to him, yet when he tried to reach that something it was not there. Unknown forces possessed her, she was wandering in ways he could not follow… . Now and then he got up and replenished the stove; now and then he wet a handkerchief with cologne water and put it on her forehead, or clumsily shook up her pillows… . But he did it all automatically, as if he too were elsewhere, in ways as lonely as those she walked… . Was this why we were all so fundamentally alone? Because, as each might blend with another in blissful fusion, so, at any moment, the empty eyes of a stranger might meet us under familiar brows? But then, where was the real primordial personality, each man's indestructible inmost self? Where did it hide, what was it made of, what laws controlled it? What was the Vance Weston who must remain himself though sickness and sorrow and ruin destroyed the familiar surface of his being? Or was there no such unchangeable nucleus? Would he and Laura Lou and all their kind flow back finally into that vast impersonal Divinity which had loomed in his boyish dreams? … But, oh, those little hands with twining fingers, the deep-lashed eyes, the hollows under the cheekbones—those were Laura Lou's and no other's, they belonged to the body he worshipped, whose lovely secrets were his… .