--or supper hour for many--and the
park was given up to the lounging sailors from the river-side streets.

The doctor's face was dark.

"No, it is not paralysis," he said. "Let us proceed at once to your own
home, Mr. Dolph. In view of what I am now inclined to consider his
condition, I think it would be the most advisable course."

He was as precise and exact in his speech, even then, as he was later
on, when years had given an innocent, genial pomposity to his delivery
of his rounded sentences.

They put old Jacob Dolph to bed in the room which he had always
occupied, in his married as in his widowed days. He never spoke again;
that day, indeed, he hardly moved. But on the next he stirred uneasily,
as though he were striving to change his position. The doctor bled him,
and they shifted him as best they could, but he seemed no more
comfortable. So the doctor bled him again; and even that did no good.

About sunset, Aline, who had watched over him with hardly a moment's
rest, left the room for a quarter of an hour, to listen to what the
doctors had to say--there were four of them in the drawing-room below.
When she and her husband entered the sick-room again, the old man had
moved in his bed. He was lying on his side, his face to the windows that
looked southward, and he had raised himself a little on his arm. There
was a troubled gaze in his eyes, as of one who strains to see something
that is unaccountably missing from his sight. He turned his head a
little, as though to listen. Thus gazing, with an inward and spiritual
vision only, at the bay that his eyes might never again see, and
listening to the waves whose cadence he should hear no more, the
troubled look faded into one of inscrutable peace, and he sank back into
the hollow of his son's arm and passed away.

* * * * *

The next time that the doctor was in the house it was of a snowy night a
few days after New Year's Day. It was half-past two o'clock in the
morning, and Jacob Dolph--no longer Jacob Dolph the younger--had been
pacing furiously up and down the long dining-room--that being the
longest room in the house--when the doctor came down stairs, and
addressed him with his usual unruffled precision:

"I will request of you, Dolph, a large glass of port. I need not suggest
to you that it is unnecessary to stint the measure, for the hospitality
of this house is----"

"How is she, doctor? For God's sake, tell me--is she--