"Yes."

"Then listen. I'll go downstairs and get something for you to eat. I'll put it into a bucket, attach some kind of rope with a weighted end to it, and throw the end in at your window. I can't get outside so I'll have to do it from the pantry window and it may take some time, but I'll keep at it. When the end comes in, pull up the bucket. Do you see?"

"I'll try to."

He turned away and began the long trip down to the kitchen. Now that he was animated by a desire to help somebody else, the depression which had enveloped him was momentarily dissipated. In spite of the ever-present pain he felt almost elated when at last he arrived again in the kitchen.

Half an hour later the "rope," manufactured from several towels tied together, with a potato-masher on the end, flew in at the window just above the pantry and the carefully covered bucket disappeared from sight. "Pretty neat," Kenwick remarked to himself. "I had no idea that I could do it when I told her I would."

But the strain had been too great. He was suddenly aware that every nerve in his body was aching. Back in the den he sank down on the couch where he had spent the night. Conjecture about the woman upstairs was submerged now beneath his own physical misery. The shelves in the library were empty. There was nothing to read save a paper-backed copy of one of Dumas's earlier novels, which he discovered in a corner. He took it up and tried to lose himself in the story, but it couldn't hold him. He found himself wondering resentfully why old man Raeburn hadn't shown more interest in his non-appearance. He was furiously impatient and utterly helpless. And he told himself that these two cannot live long together without wrecking the reason. Never before in his life had he been in a position where he couldn't do something to alter obdurate circumstance. To do anything would be better than to do nothing. The thought came to him all at once that this was what women, overwhelming numbers of women, must have endured during the terrible years of the war just past. There must have been whole armies of them, furiously eager to shoulder guns and march away to the trenches with the men they loved. And instead they had to submit to being caged up in houses and, blindfolded to all vision of the outer world, perform day after day the dreary treadmill duties of routine existence. For the first time he found himself wondering why more of them hadn't gone insane under the pressure. He was certain that he himself would lose his mental balance if the blindfold wasn't soon 

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