Cole was still alive. There had been no change during
the night; to-day, the doctor said, would be the critical day. To-day
was Sunday, and Mr. Cole took his morning service at his church as
usual. He had been up all night; he looked haggard and pale, still
wearing that expression as of a man lost in a world that he had always
trusted. But he would not fail in his duty. "When two or three are
gathered together in my name...." Perhaps God would hear him.

It was a day of wonderful heat for May. No one had ever remembered so
hot a day at so early a time of year. The windows of the church were
open, but no breeze blew through the aisles. The relentless blazing blue
of the sky penetrated into the cool shadows of the church, and it was as
though the congregation sat there under shimmering glass. The waves of
light shifted, rose and fell above the bonnets and hats and bare heads,
and all the little choir boys fell asleep during the sermon.

The Cole family did not fall asleep. They sat with pale faces and stiff
backs staring at their father and thinking about their mother. Mary
and Helen were frightened; the house was so strange, everyone spoke in
whispers, and, on the way into church, many ladies had asked them how
their mother was.

They felt important as well as sad. But Jeremy did not feel important.
He had not heard the ladies and their questions--he would not have cared
if he had. People had always called him "a queer little boy," simply
because he was independent and thought more than he spoke. Nevertheless,
he had always in reality been normal enough until now. To-day he was
really "queer," was conscious for the first time of the existence of a
world whose adjacence to the real world was, in after days, to trouble
him so often and to complicate life for him so grievously. The terror
that had come down upon him when his father had left him seemed to-day
utterly to soak through into the very heart of him. His mother was going
to die unless something or somebody saved her. What was dying? Going
away, he had always been told, with a golden harp, to sing hymns in a
foreign country. But to-day the picture would not form so easily. There
was silence and darkness and confusion about this Death. His mother
was going, against her will, and no one could tell him whither she was
going. If he could only stop her dying, force God to leave her alone, to
leave her with them all as she had been before...

He fixed his eyes upon hi