At about two o’clock in the morning the sheriff came back, and walked over to the nurse who was changing Gareth’s bandages. The other officer had gone, and Gareth’s eyes were closed.

“We can’t give him anything more, sheriff,” the nurse was saying. “He’s had all the morphine now we dare administer.”

“How bad does the doctor think he is hurt?” the sheriff wondered.

The nurse whispered something.

“Did you take down all I said,” Gareth began after he had been silent for some minutes. There was nobody in the room as he said this, the nurse and sheriff having stepped out for a moment. His shouts and angry cursing brought the nurse back.

There were tears all the time at the rims of Gareth’s eyes. The return of the nurse, and a few minutes later, the sheriff, caused the Vaisey boy to become even more voluble, and demand that all his words which contained the “truth” be taken down and given to everybody to read. He wanted to make “our simple mountain people” (as Dr. Ulric called them in moments of pique and discouragement) hear all the truth about Sidney De Lakes, the train wreck, and how Brian and he had been “betrayed.”

Finally, Irene came in, but Gareth did not look at her. He never stopped talking now, lickety-­split, telling how he had refused to give up Sidney to the renderer. After a moment she hurried from the room.

The next day when he was dying, Vance, accompanied by Dr. Ulric, was admitted.

Gareth started up at the sight of Vance, and put out his right hand in his direction. At that moment, Vance must have resembled Sidney more than he had at any time in his life.

Gareth motioned for him to sit down in the chair nearest the bed. Then he began at once, the same speech as before, on endlessly.

Dr. Ulric watched Vance with, if anything, more apprehension than he showed toward Gareth, who was, after all, beyond anything he might do for him.

“Sidney never kissed me the way he did Roy.” Gareth’s words sounded both loud and far-­off to everybody assembled in the room, and Vance raised his head as if the words themselves or perhaps an explanation of them were being written on the television screen which was blank and gray before him.

But something had happened also to Vance, Dr. Ulric noted. Gareth’s words, or the cataclysmic events of the past days, had relieved his ward of most of his old-­maid prissiness and Presbyterian stiffness, or he had lost all that earlier when he had looked into the coffin which held his brother. “He had no more strength in any case to keep away the truth,” Irene Vaisey is said to have commented later with regard to him.

So now Vance listened, and nodded as Gareth spoke of forbidden kisses and embraces and hopeless love, jealousy and murder.

“They belonged to one another, Vance, and they shut me out, you see,” Gareth finished.