it, this unselfish, incessant, wholly disinterested love of poor Simeon’s gave him keen pleasure and content.  After the stroke that entombed him, some subtle instinct seemed to guide Simeon when to sit and sympathize at a distance, when to approach and give a gentle caress, with tears running from his eyes.  But the death Simeon did not understand at all.  Those who came to make the last arrangements excited him to fury.  Adelaide had to lock him in her dressing room until the funeral was over.  When she released him, he flew to the room where he had been accustomed to sit with his great and good friend.  No Hiram!  He ran from room to room, chattering wildly, made the tour of gardens and outbuildings, returned to the room in which his quest had started.  He seemed dumb with despair.  He had always looked ludicrously old and shriveled; his appearance now became tragic.  He would start up from hours of trancelike motionlessness, would make a tour of house and grounds; scrambling and shambling from place to place; chattering at doors he could not open, then pausing to listen; racing to the front fence and leaping to its top to crane up and down the street; always back in the old room in a few minutes, to resume his watch and wait.  He would let no one but Adelaide touch him, and he merely endured her; good and loving though she seemed to be, he felt that she was somehow responsible for the mysterious vanishing of his god while she had him shut away.

Sometimes in the dead of night, Adelaide or Arthur or Mrs. Ranger, waking, would hear him hurrying softly, like a ghost, along the halls or up and down the stairs.  They, with the crowding interests that compel the mind, no matter how fiercely the bereaved heart may fight against intrusion, would forget for an hour now and then the cause of the black shadow over them and all the house and all the world; and as the weeks passed their grief softened and their memories of the dead man began to give them that consoling illusion of his real presence.  But not Simeon; he could think only that his friend had been there and was gone.

At last the truth in some form must have come to him.  For he gave up the search and the hope, and lay down to die.  Food he would not touch; he neither moved nor made a sound.  When Adelaide took him up, he lifted dim tragic eyes to her for an instant, then sank back as if asleep.  One morning, they found him in Hiram’s great arm chair, huddled in its depths, his head upon his knees, his hairy hands stiff against his cheeks.  They buried him in the clump of lilac bushes of which Hiram had been especially fond.

Stronger than any other one influence for good upon Adelaide and Arthur at that critical time, was this object lesson Simeon gave—­Simeon with his single-hearted sorrow and single-minded love.

CHAPTER XV

EARLY ADVENTURES OF A ’PRENTICE