which often returned to him in later years, that his life was a fabulous nightmare and that, by cunning and conspirate artifice, he had surrendered all his hope, belief, and confidence to the lewd torture of demons masked in human flesh. Half-sensible, and purple with gasping terror, he came out finally into the warm and practical sunlight.
His last remembrance of the Fair came from a night in early autumn: with Daisy again he sat upon the driver’s seat of a motor bus, listening for the first time to the wonder of its labored chugging, as they rolled, through ploughing sheets of rain, around the gleaming roads, and by the Cascades, pouring their water down before a white building jewelled with ten thousand lights.
The summer had passed. There was the rustling of autumn winds, a whispering breath of departed revelry: carnival was almost done.
And now the house grew very still: he saw his mother very little, he did not leave the house, he was in the care of his sisters, and he was constantly admonished to silence.
One day Gant came back a second time. Grover was down with typhoid.
“He said he ate a pear at the Fair grounds,” Eliza repeated the story for the hundredth time. “He came home and complained of feeling sick. I put my hand on his head and he was burning up.’Why, child,’I said,’what on earth—?’”
Her black eyes brightened in her white face: she was afraid. She pursed her lips and spoke hopefully.
“Hello, son,” said Gant, casually entering the room; his heart shrivelled as he saw the boy.
Eliza pursed her lips more and more thoughtfully after each visit the doctor made; she seized every spare crumb of encouragement and magnified it, but her heart was sick. Then one night, tearing away the mask suddenly, she came swiftly from the boy’s room.
“Mr. Gant,” she said in a whisper, pursing her lips. She shook her white face at him silently as if unable to speak. Then, rapidly, she concluded: “He’s gone, he’s gone, he’s gone!”
