In three days he was gone.
Flora took to her bed. Next day Adele, a faint, unwonted color marking
her cheeks, walked into her mother's bedroom and stood at the side of
the recumbent figure. Her father, his hands clasped behind him, was
pacing up and down, now and then kicking a cushion that had fallen to
the floor. He was chewing a dead cigar, one side of his face twisted
curiously over the cylinder in his mouth so that he had a sinister and
crafty look.

"Charnsworth, won't you please stop ramping up and down like that! My
nerves are killing me. I can't help it if the war has done something
or other to your business. I'm sure no wife could have been more
economical than I have. Nothing matters but Eugene, anyway. How could
he do such a thing! I've given my whole life to my children----"

H. Charnsworth kicked the cushion again so that it struck the wall at
the opposite side of the room. Flora drew her breath in between her
teeth as though a knife had entered her heart.

Adele still stood at the side of the bed, looking at her mother. Her
hands were clasped behind her, too. In that moment, as she stood
there, she resembled her mother and her father so startlingly and
simultaneously that the two, had they been less absorbed in their own
affairs, must have marked it.

The girl's head came up stiffly. "Listen. I'm going to marry Daniel
Oakley."

Daniel Oakley was fifty, and a friend of her father's. For years he
had been coming to the house and for years she had ridiculed him. She
and Eugene had called him Sturdy Oak because he was always talking
about his strength and endurance, his walks, his rugged health;
pounding his chest meanwhile and planting his feet far apart. He and
Baldwin had had business relations as well as friendly ones.

At this announcement Flora screamed and sat up in bed. H. Charnsworth
stopped short in his pacing and regarded his daughter with a queer
look; a concentrated look, as though what she had said had set in
motion a whole mass of mental machinery within his brain.

"When did he ask you?"

"He's asked me a dozen times. But it's different now. All the men
will be going to war. There won't be any left. Look at England and
France. I'm not going to be left." She turned squarely toward her
father, her young face set and hard. "You know what I mean. You know
what I mean."

Flora, sitting up in bed, was sobbing. "I think you might have told
your mother, Adele. W