was not even delirious, and it did not last
long. When she was well enough to leave her bed, her one thought was of
George's mother, of his strangely worded wish that she should go to her
and see what she could do for her. In the exaltation of the duty laid
upon her--it buoyed her up instead of burdening her--she rapidly
recovered.

Her father went with her on the long railroad journey from northern New
York to western Iowa; he had business out at Davenport, and he said he
could just as well go then as any other time; and he went with her to
the little country town where George's mother lived in a little house
on the edge of the illimitable cornfields, under trees pushed to a top
of the rolling prairie. George's father had settled there after the
Civil War, as so many other old soldiers had done; but they were Eastern
people, and Editha fancied touches of the East in the June rose
overhanging the front door, and the garden with early summer flowers
stretching from the gate of the paling fence.

It was very low inside the house, and so dim, with the closed blinds,
that they could scarcely see one another: Editha tall and black in her
crapes which filled the air with the smell of their dyes; her father
standing decorously apart with his hat on his forearm, as at funerals; a
woman rested in a deep arm-chair, and the woman who had let the
strangers in stood behind the chair.

The seated woman turned her head round and up, and asked the woman
behind her chair: "_Who_ did you say?"

Editha, if she had done what she expected of herself, would have gone
down on her knees at the feet of the seated figure and said, "I am
George's Editha," for answer.

But instead of her own voice she heard that other woman's voice, saying:
"Well, I don't know as I _did_ get the name just right. I guess I'll
have to make a little more light in here," and she went and pushed two
of the shutters ajar.

Then Editha's father said, in his public will-now-address-a-few-remarks
tone: "My name is Balcom, ma'am--Junius H. Balcom, of Balcom's Works,
New York; my daughter--"

"Oh!" the seated woman broke in, with a powerful voice, the voice that
always surprised Editha from Gearson's slender frame. "Let me see you.
Stand round where the light can strike on your face," and Editha dumbly
obeyed. "So, you're Editha Balcom," she sighed.

"Yes," Editha said, more like a culprit than a comforter.

"What did you come for?" Mrs. Gearson asked.

Editha's