honograph.

The blind on a window of the house next door was pulled to one side,
emitting a shaft of light across the path he paced. A head--the head of
the little girl his father had so often petted as he strode up the walk
when he came home from work--shut off the light. He heard a scuffle of
feet and she was pulled from the window.

Mrs. Sprockett's husband, in his shirt sleeves, came over and stood on
the sidewalk.

"Is Maude in there with your mother?" he asked.

John looked at him, without a word.

"Beg your pardon," said Mrs. Sprockett's husband, backing away. "She
didn't say--didn't leave any word--and the baby--and--"

The crying of the Sprockett baby could be heard faintly.

"I didn't think--I--I----" and Mrs. Sprockett's husband turned awkwardly
and went back to the house.

Everything was quiet, so quiet that it startled him. A mocking bird
warbled in a tree by the porch. He remembered his father saying one
night that there was no music sweeter than its song.

Fragments of memory came to him vividly. His father pulling him from
under a bed the night he was punished for stealing apples at the corner
grocery store. His father reading David Copperfield to him and their
mutual rejoicing when Betsy Trotwood lectured David's firm stepfather.
His father closing his eyes and leaning back and a soft smile on his
lips as his mother played "Annie Laurie."

These thoughts carried him away so that he stopped quickly when they
left him. For a moment he could not realize that death was taking his
father. He felt he had been out of his head, walking out there, that it
was all a horrible nightmare. He almost began to laugh and dash up to
the door to find things as they always had been. He staggered back with
an impulse to shout in his agony as realization came back to him.

A wild hope seized him. He had been walking there for hours, for days it
seemed, and the door had not opened. Perhaps the doctor was wrong, after
all. Perhaps his father had rallied strength and would live. His heart
beat exultingly. Perhaps----

And then the door opened.

* * * * *

He knew that his father had left them nothing but what was in the house.
He had not spoken to his mother about it. He had been beside her bed
until after dawn when, with a gentle sigh, she had slipped off into a
merciful sleep.

Mrs. Sprockett, who left them only for a few minutes in the morning, he
thanked with a guilty feelin