to me."

"That 'll do, then! I want you to have him come back and write for
the book when he gets well. I want you to find out and let me know
if there's anything I can do for him. I'll feel as if I done it--for
my--son. I'll take him into my own house, and do for him there, if you
say so, when he gets so he can be moved. I'll wait on him myself. It's
what Coonrod 'd do, if he was here. I don't feel any hardness to him
because it was him that got Coonrod killed, as you might say, in one
sense of the term; but I've tried to think it out, and I feel like I
was all the more beholden to him because my son died tryin' to save him.
Whatever I do, I'll be doin' it for Coonrod, and that's enough for me."
He seemed to have finished, and he turned to March as if to hear what he
had to say.

March hesitated. "I'm afraid, Mr. Dryfoos--Didn't Fulkerson tell you
that Lindau was very sick?"

"Yes, of course. But he's all right, he said."

Now it had to come, though the fact had been latterly playing fast and
loose with March's consciousness. Something almost made him smile; the
willingness he had once felt to give this old man pain; then he consoled
himself by thinking that at least he was not obliged to meet Dryfoos's
wish to make atonement with the fact that Lindau had renounced him, and
would on no terms work for such a man as he, or suffer any kindness from
him. In this light Lindau seemed the harder of the two, and March had
the momentary force to say--

"Mr. Dryfoos--it can't be. Lindau--I have just come from him--is dead."

XI.

"How did he take it? How could he bear it? Oh, Basil! I wonder you could
have the heart to say it to him. It was cruel!"

"Yes, cruel enough, my dear," March owned to his wife, when they talked
the matter over on his return home. He could not wait till the children
were out of the way, and afterward neither he nor his wife was sorry
that he had spoken of it before them. The girl cried plentifully for her
old friend who was dead, and said she hated Mr. Dryfoos, and then
was sorry for him, too; and the boy listened to all, and spoke with a
serious sense that pleased his father. "But as to how he took it," March
went on to answer his wife's question about Dryfoos--"how do any of
us take a thing that hurts? Some of us cry out, and some of us don't.
Dryfoos drew a kind of long, quivering breath, as a child does when it
grieves--there's something curiously simple and primitive about him--and