here he begins to be wrong."

"Why not admit he's right through and through, and be done with it?"
cried Arthur impatiently. "Why not tell him so, and square yourself
with him?"

Adelaide, too hurt to venture speech, turned away. She lingered a while
in the library; on her way down the hall to ascend to her own room she
looked in at her father. There he sat so still that but for the regular
rise and fall of his chest she would have thought him dead. "He's
asleep," she murmured, the tears standing in her eyes and raining in her
heart. Her mother she could judge impartially; her mother's disregard of
the changes which had come to assume so much importance in her own and
Arthur's lives often made her wince. But the same disregard in a man did
not offend her; it had the reverse effect. It seemed to her, to the woman
in her, the fitting roughness of the colossal statue. "That's a _man_!"
she now said to herself proudly, as she gazed at him.

His eyes opened and fixed upon her in a look so agonized, that she
leaned, faint, against the door jamb. "What is it, father?" she gasped.

He did not answer--did not move--sat rigidly on, with that expression
unchanging, as if it had been fixed there by the sculptor who had made
the statue. She tried to go to him, but at the very thought she was
overwhelmed by such fear as she had not had since she, a child, lay in
her little bed in the dark, too terrified by the phantoms that beset her
to cry out or to move. "Father! What is it?" she repeated, then wheeled
and fled along the hall crying: "Mother! Mother!"

Ellen came hurrying down the stairs.

"It's father!" cried Adelaide.

Together they went into the back parlor. He was still motionless, with
that same frozen yet fiery expression. They went to him, tried to lift
him. Ellen dropped the lifeless arm, turned to her daughter. And Adelaide
saw into her mother's inmost heart, saw the tragic lift of one of those
tremendous emotions, which, by their very coming into a human soul, give
it the majesty and the mystery of the divine.

"Telephone for Dr. Schulze," she commanded; then, as Adelaide sped, she
said tenderly to her husband: "Where is the pain? What can I do?"

But he did not answer. And if he could have answered, what could she have
done? The pain was in his heart, was the burning agony of remorse for
having done that which he still believed to be right, that which he now
thought he would give his soul's salvation for the cha