liott, and never far from you. When you call to me, I hear you.
All is not yet clear, but I wish I could tell you more of the whole
meaning. I am near you this moment. I wish that--' The message stopped
there," explained Cousin Parnelia, laying down the paper.

Professor Marshall leaned over it, straining his eyes to the rude
scrawls, passing his hand over his forehead as though to brush away a
web. He broke out in a loud, high voice. "That is her handwriting....
Good God, her very handwriting--the way she writes Elliott--it is from
_her!_" He snatched the paper up and took it to the window, stumbling
over the chairs blindly as he went. As he held it up to the light,
poring over it again, he began to weep, crying out his wife's name
softly, the tears streaming down his unshaven cheeks. He came back to
the table, and sank down before it, still sobbing, still murmuring
incessantly, "Oh, Barbara--Barbara!" and laid his head on his
outstretched arms.

"Let him cry!" whispered Cousin Parnelia sentimentally to Sylvia,
drawing her away into the hall. A few moments later when they looked
in, he had fallen asleep, his head turned to one side so that Sylvia
saw his face, tear-stained and exhausted, but utterly relaxed and at
peace, like that of a little child in sleep. Crushed in one hand was
the yellow sheet of paper covered with coarse, wavering marks.

CHAPTER XLV

"_That our soul may swim
We sink our heart down, bubbling, under wave_"

The two sisters, their pale faces grave in the shadow of their wide
hats, were on their knees with trowels in a border of their mother's
garden. Judith had been giving a report of Lawrence's condition, and
Sylvia was just finishing an account of what had happened at home,
when the gate in the osage-orange hedge clicked, and a blue-uniformed
boy came whistling up the path. He made an inquiry as to names, and
handed Sylvia an envelope. She opened it, read silently, "Am starting
for America and you at once. Felix." She stood looking at the paper
for a moment, her face quite unmoved from its quiet sadness. The boy
asked, "Any answer?"

"No," she said decisively, shaking her head. "No answer."

As he lingered, lighting a cigarette, she put a question in her turn,
"Anything to pay?"

"No," said the boy, putting the cigarette-box back in his pocket,
"Nothing to pay." He produced a worn and greasy book, "Sign on this
line," he said, and after she had signed, he went away down the