ng cry: "We can't do--_anything_!"

No one answered her. She had begged Madison to go over it all again--and
she had summed it up herself. There was--the Patriarch.

There was utter silence in the room now, save only for that low, solemn
boom of distant surf--for Madison had stopped his nervous pacing up and
down, and stood now by the Patriarch's armchair gazing into the
fireplace.

The minutes passed, and the silence in that dim, shadowed room grew
tense--and tenser still--until the very shadows themselves, as the lamp
flickered now and then, seemed to creep and shift and readjust
themselves in stealth. No sound--no movement--utter stillness--only,
from without, the mourning of the surf, like a dirge now.

And then, with a sudden sob, Helena flung out her arms across the table
toward the Patriarch.

"Oh, if he could only speak!" she cried pitifully. "If he could only
speak--he would show us the way out."

The words seemed to come to Madison as an added pang. He turned his eyes
instinctively from the fireplace to the Patriarch beside him--and then,
a moment, as a man stricken, he stood there--and then reaching quickly
for the lamp from the table he held it up, and leaned forward toward the
figure in the chair.

Helena, startled at the act, rose almost unconsciously to her feet, her
hands holding tightly to the table edge--looking at Madison, looking at
the silent form where Pale Face Harry, where the Flopper looked.

"What is it?" she asked tensely, under her breath.

Madison's lips moved--silently. His face was white, ashen--there was no
color in it. Then his lips moved once more.

"The way out," he said; and again, in a low, awed way: "_The way out_.
We can make restitution now--we can give it all back--he _has_ shown us
the way out."

Helena's lips were quivering, tears were dimming the brown eyes,
trembling on the lashes, as she stepped now to Madison's side.

"It is God who has shown us the way out," she whispered brokenly--and
dropping down before the chair, her little form shaken with sobs, she
hid her face on the Patriarch's knees.

And serene and peaceful as a child in sleep, a smile like a benediction
on the saintly face, the Patriarch sat in his armchair by the fireplace
where he had been wont to sit in years gone by--and so he had passed on.

The Patriarch was dead.

--XXIV--

VALE!

The years have passed--but in their passing have brought few changes to
the little village nestl