nce to undo. For,
as the paralysis began to lock his body fast in its vise, the awful
thought had for the first time come to him: "When my children know what I
have done they will _hate_ me! They will hate me all their lives."

Dr. Schulze examined him. "Somewhat sooner than I expected," he muttered.

"How long will it last?" said Ellen.

"Some time--several weeks--months--perhaps." He would let her learn
gradually that the paralysis would not relax its grip until it had borne
him into the eternal prison and had handed him over to the jailer who
makes no deliveries.

CHAPTER VII

JILTED

Mrs. Ranger consented to a third girl, to do the additional heavy work;
but a nurse--no! What had Hiram a wife for, and a daughter, and a son, if
not to take care of him? What kind of heartlessness was this, to talk of
permitting a stranger to do the most sacred offices of love? And only by
being on the watch early and late did Adelaide and Arthur prevent her
doing everything for him herself.

"Everybody, nowadays, has trained nurses in these cases," said Dr.
Schulze. "I don't think you ought to object to the expense."

But the crafty taunt left her as indifferent as did the argument from
what "everybody does."

"I don't make rules for others," replied she. "I only say that nobody
shall touch Hiram but us of his own blood. I won't hear to it, and the
children won't hear to it. They're glad to have the chance to do a little
something for him that has done everything for them."

The children thus had no opportunity to say whether they would "hear to
it" or not. But Arthur privately suggested to Adelaide that she ought
to try to persuade her mother. "It will make her ill, all this extra
work," said he.

"Not so quickly as having some one about interfering with her,"
replied Adelaide.

"Then, too, it _looks_ so bad--so stingy and--and--old-fashioned," he
persisted.

"Not from mother's point of view," said Adelaide quietly.

Arthur flushed. "Always putting me in the wrong," he sneered. Then,
instantly ashamed of this injustice, he went on in a different tone, "I
suppose this sort of thing appeals to the romantic strain in you."

"And in mother," said Del.

Whereupon they both smiled. Romantic was about the last word anyone would
think of in connection with frankly practical Ellen Ranger. She would
have died without hesitation, or lived in torment, for those she loved;
but she would have done it in the finest, mos