appetite of the flood was a
question likewise unanswered. Whether or not the daughter, who was the
man of the family after himself, would return in time to comfort his
last moments was a doubt which troubled him most of all. He had sent
her away as unequivocally as a stricken captain sends his first officer
to the bridge, but he wanted her as a man, shipwrecked and starving,
wants the sight of a sail or of a smoke-stack on an empty horizon.

And his boy--the boy who had given him small strength upon which to
lean, was absent. He had gone idly and thoughtlessly before the
emergency arose, and the man lying on the four-poster bed tried to
argue for him, in extenuation, that he would have returned had he known
the need. But in his bruised and doubting heart he knew that had it
been Alexander, she would have read the warning in the first brook that
she saw creeping into an augmented stream, and would have hastened home.

About the room moved the self-taught doctor, who was also the local
Evangelist. Two neighbor women were there too, called from adjacent
cabins to take the place of the daughter he had sent away. They were
ignorant women, hollow-chested and wrinkled like witches because they
had spent lives against dun-colored backgrounds, but they were wise in
the matter of "yarbs" and simple nursing.

All night Aaron McGivins had lain there, restive and unable to sleep.
With him had been those matters which obtrude themselves, with
confusing multiplicity, upon the mind of a man who was yesterday strong
and unthreatened and who to-day faces the requirement of readjusting
all his scheme from the clear and lighted ways of life to the gathering
mists of death. He had seen through a high-placed window the gray of
dawn grow into a clearer light, making visible rag-like streamers of
wet and scudding clouds. He had a glimpse of mountain-sides sodden
with thaw--the thaw to which he owed his whole sum of sudden
perplexities.

Then the door swung open.

Eagerly the bed-ridden man turned his eyes towards it; eagerly, too,
the doctor's gaze went that way, but the two women, glancing sidewise,
sniffed dubiously and stiffened a little. To them the anxiously
awaited daughter was an unsexed creature whom they could neither
understand nor approve. They had lived hard and intolerent lives,
accepting drudgery and perennial child-bearing as unquestioned mandates
of destiny. Accustomed to the curt word and to servile obedience