"Oh, sure—" said the doctor, who was young and not very articulate. He stamped his feet on the wooden step, and added: "Not that there's much else to do."

"You mean she'll pull round soon, with this tonic?" Vance held the prescription in his hand.

The doctor looked at his Ford, and then at Vance. He had a poor sort of face, not made for emotional emergencies, and seemed to know it. He laid his hand awkwardly on Vance's shoulder. "If I was sure she'd pull round, I'd have to take her away from here today. I'm not sure—that's why I'm going to let you keep her." He turned and went down the steps. From his seat in the car he called out to Vance, who had not moved: "Anyway, I'll look in tomorrow."

After the doctor had driven away Vance continued to stand in the same place in the porch. He was trying to piece together the meaning of the words: "That's why I'm letting you keep her." Laura Lou had doubtless known that if the doctor had been sent for sooner she would have been packed off to a sanitarium. Now it didn't matter—and that meant that she was dying, or at least that the doctor thought so. Vance tried to grasp the reality underlying the words, but it slipped out of his hold. He knew very little of the character of tuberculosis, except for its more melodramatic features: fever, hemorrhages and night sweats—the sort of consumption people had in sentimental novels. Of the real disease he had no experience. But he saw that Laura Lou was less ignorant; he had guessed instantly that in her terror of being taken from him she had concealed her condition as long as possible; and he wondered dully if she had understood that the doctor's permission to her to remain at the bungalow was her death warrant. But even that dark word conveyed little meaning. The doctor's phrase had acted like some strange corrosive, decomposing Vance's visible world. He stood in the porch repeating to himself: "Laura Lou, Laura Lou," as if the name were a magic formula against destruction. He tasted something salt on his lips, and found that the tears were running down his face… .