inflection. "Is there some
message?"

"It is my message," said the Doctor, with dignity. "Say to him, please,
that no provision has been made for music to-morrow, and that I would
like him to come. Be sure to say that I ask it."

"Very well."

Lynn moved away from the house decorously, though the freedom of the
outer air and the spring of the turf beneath his feet lifted the cloud
from his spirits and urged him to hasten his steps.

Doctor Brinkerhoff looked after him, his old eyes dim. The impassable
chasm of the years lay between him and Lynn--a measureless gulf which no
trick of magic might span. "If I had it to do over," said the Doctor, to
himself,--"if I had my lost youth--and was not afraid,--things would not
be as they are now."

Margaret saw him from her upper window, and something tightened round
her heart, as though some iron hand held it unpityingly. Then came a
great throb of relief, because it was Aunt Peace, instead of Lynn.

Iris, too, had seen him as he left the house. She perceived that he was
eager to get away--that only a sense of the fitness of things kept him
from running and whistling as was his wont. From the first, she had
known that it was nothing to him. "He has no heart," she said to
herself. "He is as cold as--as cold as Aunt Peace is now."

Slow torture held the girl in a remorseless gird. Dimly, she knew that
some day there would be a change--that it could not always be like
this. Sometime it must ease, and each throb would be sensibly less of a
hurt--just a little easier to bear. With rare prescience, also, she knew
that nothing in the world would ever be the same again--that she had
come to the dividing line. One reaches it as a light-hearted child; one
crosses it--a woman.

"No," said the Doctor, for the fiftieth time, "there is nothing you can
do. Mrs. Irving and Miss Temple are not receiving. Yes, we expected it.
The end was very peaceful and she did not suffer at all. Yes, it is
surely a comfort to know that. The arrangements are all made. Yes, thank
you, we have the music provided for. It was kind of you to come, and the
ladies will be grateful for your sympathy. Who shall I say called?"

Behind him were the portraits, ranged in orderly rows. Some were old and
others young, but all had gone the way that Peace should go to-morrow.
Dumbly, the Doctor wondered if the same remorseless questioning had gone
on every time there had been a death in the old house, and, if so, why