hen his mind turned to the girl with whom he was
to have spent this evening and again he was half angry
at the turn of events that had prevented his going to
her.

In the dimly lighted room with the dead woman the young
man began to have thoughts. His mind played with
thoughts of life as his mother's mind had played with
the thought of death. He closed his eyes and imagined
that the red young lips of Helen White touched his own
lips. His body trembled and his hands shook. And then
something happened. The boy sprang to his feet and
stood stiffly. He looked at the figure of the dead
woman under the sheets and shame for his thoughts swept
over him so that he began to weep. A new notion came
into his mind and he turned and looked guiltily about
as though afraid he would be observed.

George Willard became possessed of a madness to lift
the sheet from the body of his mother and look at her
face. The thought that had come into his mind gripped
him terribly. He became convinced that not his mother
but someone else lay in the bed before him. The
conviction was so real that it was almost unbearable.
The body under the sheets was long and in death looked
young and graceful. To the boy, held by some strange
fancy, it was unspeakably lovely. The feeling that the
body before him was alive, that in another moment a
lovely woman would spring out of the bed and confront
him, became so overpowering that he could not bear the
suspense. Again and again he put out his hand. Once he
touched and half lifted the white sheet that covered
her, but his courage failed and he, like Doctor Reefy,
turned and went out of the room. In the hallway outside
the door he stopped and trembled so that he had to put
a hand against the wall to support himself. "That's not
my mother. That's not my mother in there," he whispered
to himself and again his body shook with fright and
uncertainty. When Aunt Elizabeth Swift, who had come to
watch over the body, came out of an adjoining room he
put his hand into hers and began to sob, shaking his
head from side to side, half blind with grief. "My
mother is dead," he said, and then forgetting the woman
he turned and stared at the door through which he had
just come. "The dear, the dear, oh the lovely dear,"
the boy, urged by some impulse outside himself,
muttered aloud.

As for the eight hundred dollars the dead woman had
kept hidden so long and that was to give George Willard
his start in the city, it lay