r mouth slightly parted. Her
little bony hands lay in her lap, with the fingers limp in utter
nerveless relaxation, but she was not asleep. She opened her eyes
when her children came to the door, but she did not speak nor turn
her head. Presently her eyes closed again.

Jerome pulled Elmira back into the parlor. "You must go ahead and get
the dinner, and make her some gruel, and not ask her a question, and
not bother her about anything," he whispered, sternly. "She's
resting; she'll die if she don't. It's awful for her. It's bad 'nough
for us, but we don't know what 'tis for her."

Elmira assented, with wide, scared, piteous eyes on her brother.

"Go now and get the dinner," said Jerome.

"There's lots left over from yesterday," said Elmira, forlornly.
"Shall we have anything after that's gone?"

"Have enough while I've got two hands," returned Jerome, gruffly.
"Get some potatoes and boil 'em, and have some of that cold meat, and
make mother the gruel."

Elmira obeyed, finding a certain comfort in that. Indeed, she
belonged assuredly to that purely feminine order of things which
gains perhaps its best strength through obedience. Give Elmira a
power over her, and she would never quite fall.

Elmira went about getting dinner, tiptoeing around her mother, who
still sat sunken in her strange apathy of melancholy or exhaustion,
it was difficult to tell which, while Jerome spaded and dug in the
garden, in the fury of zeal which he had inherited from her.

Elmira had dinner ready early, and called Jerome. When he went in he
found her trying to induce her mother to swallow a bowl of gruel.
"Won't you take it, mother?" she was pleading, with tears in her
eyes; but her mother only lifted one hand feebly and motioned it
away; she would not raise her head or open her eyes.

"Give me that bowl," said Jerome. He held it before his mother, and
slipped one hand behind her neck, constraining her gently to raise
her head. "Here, mother," said he, "here's your gruel."

She resisted faintly, and shook her weak, repelling hand again. "Sit
up, mother, and drink your gruel," said Jerome, and his mother's eyes
flew wide open at that, and stared up in his face with eager inquiry;
for again she had that wild surmise that her lost husband spoke to
her.

"Drink it, mother," said Jerome, again meeting her half-delirious
gaze fully; and Ann seemed to see his father looking at her from his
son's eyes, through his immortality after the f