's the end, I'm afraid!"

Julia clung to his arm; never had Richie seemed so dear and good to her.

"Your mother will die of it, Rich," she said, to say something. The room
seemed to her shouting with Jim's presence; she kept her eyes on
Richie's face. Ned, never more than an overgrown boy, put his face in
his hands and began to sob.

"Sh--h!" Jim warned them. Mrs. Toland came in.

"He's better--he wants to see you boys!" she said, tremulously happy.
Her eyes went from face to face. "Why, what's the matter?" she demanded.
"You don't think it's--do you, Richie? Do you, Jim?"

Richie merely flung up his head and set his lips. Jim put one arm around
her.

"He's pretty ill, dear," he said gently, and Julia found his smooth
tenderness infinitely less bearable than Richie's bluntness.

"Why, but what are you talking about--what do you mean--I don't know
what you mean!" Mrs. Toland said bewilderedly. "Doctor Barr has gone
home, Richie; he said he wouldn't come back unless we sent for him!" No
one answered her, and as her pitiful look went from Julia's grave face
to Richard's sorrowful one, from Ned's despairing figure by the fire to
Jim's troubled look, terror seemed to seize her. Her pretty middle-aged
face wrinkled; she began to cry bitterly.

Julia put her in a deep chair, knelt before her, trying rather to calm
than to comfort her, and after a while so far succeeded that she could
take the poor shaken old lady upstairs. She did not glance again at Jim,
although he opened the door for them, and tried his best to catch her
eye.

Between five and six o'clock he was summoned to the sickroom. They were
all there: the girls on their knees, Richard kneeling by his father, his
fingers on the failing pulse. Mrs. Toland was seated, Julia kneeling
beside her, holding both her cold hands. A sound of subdued sobbing
filled the air; no sound came from the dying man except when a
fluttering breath raised his chest. His eyes were shut; he appeared to
be sleeping.

The clock on the mantel struck six, and as if roused, Doctor Toland
stirred a little, and whispered, "Janey!" Poor Janey's head went down
against the white counterpane; she never dreamed that the little-girl
aunt, dead fifty years ago, with apple cheeks under a slatted
sun-bonnet, and more apples in her lunch bag, had come in a vision of
old orchard and sun-bathed river, to put her warm little hand in her
brother's again, and lead him home. And before the clock struc