"Mary Deane, do not tell me what is not and what cannot be true! A sick man--an old man--can be no 'pleasure' to anyone;--he is nothing but a bore and a trouble, and the sooner he dies the better!" The smiling softness still lingered in her eyes.
"Ah well!"-- she said--"You talk like that because you're not strong yet, and you just feel a bit cross and worried! You'll be better in another few days----" "Another few days!" he interrupted her--"No--no--that cannot be--I must be up and tramping it again--I must not stay on here--I have already stayed too long." A slight shadow crossed her face, but she was silent.

He watched her narrowly.
"I've been off my head, haven't I ?" he queried, affecting a certain brusqueness in his tone--"Talking a lot of nonsense, I suppose ?" "Yes--sometimes,"-- she replied--"But only when you were _very_ bad." "And what did I say ?" She hesitated a moment, and he grew impatient.
"Come, come!" he demanded, irritably--"What did I say ?" She looked at him candidly.
"You talked mostly about 'Tom o' the Gleam,'"-- she answered--"That was a poor gypsy well known in these parts.

He had just one little child left to him in the world--its mother was dead.

Some rich lord driving a motor car down by Cleeve ran over the poor baby and killed it--and Tom----" "Tom tracked the car to Blue Anchor, where he found the man who had run over his child and killed _him_!" said Helmsley, with grim satisfaction--"I saw it done!" Mary shuddered.
"I saw it done!" repeated Helmsley--"And I think it was rightly done! But--I saw Tom himself die of grief and madness--with his dead child in his arms--and _that!_--that broke something in my heart and brain and made me think God was cruel!" She bent over him, and arranged his pillows more comfortably.
"I knew Tom,"-- she said, presently, in a soft voice--"He was a wild creature, but very kind and good for all that.

Some folks said he had been born a gentleman, and that a quarrel with his family had made him take to the gypsy life--but that's only a story.