The day came when it seemed safe for Haig to stand and to move a little about the cave. He had fashioned slowly a pair of rude crutches, if they could be so called,--two pine limbs trimmed down with his pocketknife, with their natural forks left to fit under his arms. Marion protested that he was attempting this feat much too soon, but she was compelled to watch him in an agony of suspense lest he should fall on the hard floor of the cave, or rest his weight on the injured leg, and so undo all that had cost them so much of care and labor. But caution restrained him; for he was aware of the danger, though he was also half-mad with impatience to be a man once more. Venturing only a few tentative steps at first, he steadily accustomed himself to movement with the aid of the awkward crutches, and in a few days was able to take up some of the work of their wretched habitation. Marion saw that this pleased him immensely, almost as if he had been a boy entrusted with a man's responsibility; and once, too, she saw him stand a long time before the row of notches on the wall, and thought his figure straightened, and a flush came into his pale cheek.
And then, in the sixth week of their imprisonment, Marion fell ill. She had caught a cold, which was not the first by any means, but much more severe than its predecessors. With watery eyes and red noses and distressing coughs they had become familiar, but this was plainly a more serious matter. For three days more she dragged herself about, trying to conceal her state from him and from herself, but crying softly when he did not see her.
One morning, as the dawn crept into the cavern, she tried as usual to rise from her hard bed, and fell back with a stifled moan. Haig heard her, and raised his head quickly, struck by an unaccustomed note in her low cry.
"It's no use, dear!" she whispered. "I can't get up."
For a moment he lay stricken, incapable of thought. Not that the event was unexpected. He had been reckoning on that; he had seen her steadily failing, and knew that she could not go on indefinitely under such privations. And yet, when it came, it was appalling. The grayness of the cave settled down upon him like a pall. Once he would have been indifferent to it, resigned to the knowledge that it was inevitable. But now he had come, if not to share her hope, at least to sympathize with it, and to wish ardently for her sake that her faith might be justified. And it seemed a pitiable thing that she should have been deceived, an intolerable thing that she should die there so uselessly,--for him.