had grown more collected, but she was dazed rather than
reconciled to her fate; her mind had not yet absorbed the full extent of
her sorrow. She talked incessantly and dwelt on trivialities, as people
will under a weight of events too large to measure or discuss.

"I am going to write to Tom's father," she said. "This will be an awful
blow to him. He was wrapped up in Tom. And to think that I was troubling
about his letter! He will never see the sea he loved so much again. He
always hated that verse in the Bible that says there will be no more
sea. I was asleep so near him last night. Yet I never heard him cry out
or anything."

Mannering talked gently to her.

"Be sure he did not cry out. He felt no pain, no shock--I am sure of
that. To die is no hardship to the dead, remember. He is at peace, Mary.
You must come and see him presently. Your father will call you soon.
There is just a look of wonder in his face--no fear, no suffering. Keep
that in mind."

"He could not have felt fear. He knew of nothing that a brave man might
fear, except doing wrong. Nobody knows how good he was but me. His
father loved him fiercely, passionately; but he never knew how good he
was, because Tom did not think quite like old Mr. May. I must write and
say that Tom is dangerously ill, and cannot recover. That will break it
to him. Tom was the only earthly affection he had. It will be terrible
when he comes."

They left her, and, after they had gone, she rose, fell on her knees,
and so remained, motionless and tearless, for a long time. Through her
own desolation, as yet unrealized, there still persisted the thought
of her husband's father. It seemed that her mind could dwell on his
isolation, while powerless to present the truth of her husband's death
to her. By some strange mental operation, not unbeneficent, she saw his
grief more vividly than as yet she felt her own. She rose presently,
quick-eared to wait the call, and went to her desk in the window. Then
she wrote a letter to her father-in-law, and pictured his ministering at
that moment to his church. Her inclination was to soften the blow, yet
she knew that could only be a cruel kindness. She told him, therefore,
that his son must die. Then she remembered that he was so near. A
telegram must go rather than a letter, and he would be at Chadlands
before nightfall. She destroyed her letter and set about a telegram.
Jane Bond came in, and she asked her to dispatch the telegram as qu