doubt of his obedience to them.  He lifted his head, looked at her, and allowed her to lead him down the stairs and again into the dining-room.  Here he sat, quite spent, staring before him until Sylvia returned from the kitchen with a plate of cold meat and some bread.  She sat down beside him, putting out again consciously all her strength, and set the knife and fork in his nerveless hands.  In the gentle monologue with which she accompanied his meal she did not mention her mother, or anything but slight, casual matters about the house and garden.  She found herself speaking in a hushed tone, as though not to awake a sleeping person.  Although she sat quite quietly, her hands loosely folded on the table, her heart was thrilling and burning to a high resolve.  “Now it is my turn to help my father.”

After he had eaten a few mouthfuls and laid down the knife and fork, she did not insist further, but rose to lead him to the couch in the living-room.  She dared not risk his own room, the bed on which her mother had died.

“Now you must lie down and rest, Father,” she said, loosening his clothes and unlacing his shoes as though he had been a sick child.  He let her do what she would, and as she pushed him gently back, he yielded and lay down at full length.  Sylvia sat down beside him, feeling her strength ebbing.  Her father lay on his back, his eyes wide open.  On the ceiling above him a circular flicker of light danced and shimmered, reflected from a glass of water on the table.  His eyes fastened upon this, at first unwinkingly, with a fixed intensity, and later with dropped lids and half-upturned eyeballs.  He was quite quiet, and finally seemed asleep, although the line of white between his eyelids made Sylvia shudder.

With the disappearance of the instant need for self-control and firmness, she felt an immense fatigue.  It had cost her dearly, this victory, slight as it was.  She drooped in her chair, exhausted and undone.  She looked down at the ash-gray, haggard face on the pillow, trying to find in those ravaged features her splendidly life-loving father.  It was so quiet that she could hear the big clock in the dining-room ticking loudly, and half-consciously she began to count the swings of the pendulum:  One—­two—­three—­four—­five—­six—­ seven—­eight—­nine—­ten—
­eleven—­twelve—­thirteen—­fourteen—­

She awoke to darkness and the sound of her mother’s name loudly screamed.  She started up, not remembering where she was, astonished to find herself sitting in a chair.  As she stood bewildered in the dark, the clock in the dining-room struck two.  At once from a little distance, outside the window apparently, she heard the same wild cry ringing in her ears—­“Bar-ba-ra!” All the blood in her body congealed and the hair on her head seemed to stir itself, in the instant before she recognized her father’s voice.