“I shouldn’t be surprised but your father’d be glad, if he knew,” her mother was saying.  “But it’s no use to risk telling him.  A shock might—­might make him worse.”  She started up.  “I must go to him.  I came to send you, while I was looking after Mary and the dinner, and I clean forgot.”

She hurried away.  Adelaide sat thinking, more and more forlorn, though not a whit less determined.  “I ought to admire him more than I did Ross, and I ought to want to marry him—­and I will!”

The birds had stopped singing in the noonday heat.  The breeze had died down.  Outdoors, in the house, there was not a sound.  She felt as if she must not, could not breathe.  The silence, like a stealthy hand, lifted her from her chair, drew her tiptoeing and breathless toward the room in which her father was sitting.  She paused at its threshold, looked.  There was Hiram, in his chair by the window, bolt upright, eyes open and gazing into the infinite.  Beside that statue of the peace eternal knelt Ellen, a worn, wan, shrunken figure, the hands clasped, the eyes closed, the lips moving.

“Mother!  Mother!” cried Del.

Her mother did not hear.  She was moaning, “I believe, Lord, I believe!  Help Thou my unbelief!”

CHAPTER X

“THROUGH LOVE FOR MY CHILDREN”

On the day after the funeral, Mrs. Ranger and the two children and young Hargrave were in the back parlor, waiting for Judge Torrey to come and read the will.  The well-meant intrusions, the services, the burial—­all those barbarous customs that stretch on the rack those who really love the dead whom society compels them publicly to mourn—­had left cruel marks on Adelaide and on Arthur; but their mother seemed unchanged.  She was talking incessantly now, addressing herself to Dory, since he alone was able to heed her.  Her talk was an almost incoherent stream, as if she neither knew nor cared what she was saying so long as she could keep that stream going—­the stream whose sound at least made the voice in her heart, the voice of desolation, less clear and terrible, though not less insistent.

There was the beat of a man’s footsteps on the side veranda.  Mrs. Ranger started up, listened, sat again.  “Oh,” she said, in the strangest tone, and with a hysterical little laugh, “I thought it was your father coming home to dinner!” Then from her throat issued a stifled cry like nothing but a cry borne up to the surface from a deep torture-chamber.  And she was talking on again—­with Adelaide sobbing and Arthur fighting back the tears.  Hargrave went to the door and admitted the old lawyer.