Horton himself was almost as deeply perplexed. "Mamie," he said to his

wife, when he came out of the spare room half an hour later, "will you

take Mrs. Alexander the things she needs? She is going to do everything

herself. Just stay about where you can hear her and go in if she wants

you."

Everything happened as Alexander had foreseen in that moment of

prescience under the river. With her own hands she washed him clean of

every mark of disaster. All night he was alone with her in the still

house, his great head lying deep in the pillow. In the pocket of his

coat Winifred found the letter that he had written her the night before

he left New York, water-soaked and illegible, but because of its length,

she knew it had been meant for her.

For Alexander death was an easy creditor. Fortune, which had smiled

upon him consistently all his life, did not desert him in the end.

His harshest critics did not doubt that, had he lived, he would have

retrieved himself. Even Lucius Wilson did not see in this accident the

disaster he had once foretold.

When a great man dies in his prime there is no surgeon who can say

whether he did well; whether or not the future was his, as it seemed to

be. The mind that society had come to regard as a powerful and reliable

machine, dedicated to its service, may for a long time have been sick

within itself and bent upon its own destruction.




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