ernoon, and Leonora had
called at Church Street in the forenoon, so that the solitude of the old
man might be broken at least twice a day. When she had suggested the
arrangement to her husband, John had answered stiffly, with an
unimpeachable righteousness, that everything possible must be done for
his uncle. On this fourth day, Leonora sent Ethel and Milly in the
morning, with a message that she herself would come in the afternoon, by
way of change. The phrase that sang in her head was Arthur's promise to
Meshach: 'I shall call in a day or two.' She knew that he had not yet
called. 'Don't wait tea, if I should be late, dears,' she said smilingly
to the girls; 'I may stay with uncle a while.' And she nearly ran out of
the house.

* * * * *

When they had had tea, and when Leonora had performed the delicate feat
of arranging Uncle Meshach's domestic affairs without affronting his
servant, she sat down opposite to him before the fire in the parlour.

'You're for stopping a bit, eh?' he said, as if surprised.

'Well,' she laughed, 'wouldn't you like me to?'

'Oh, ay!' he admitted readily, 'I'st like it well enough. I don't know
but what you aren't all on ye very good--you and th' wenches, and Fred
as calls in of nights. But it's all one to me, I reckon. I take no
pleasure i' life. Nay,' he went on, 'it isn't because of _her_. I've
felt as I was done for for months past. I mun just drag on.'

'Don't talk like that, uncle.' She tried conventionally to cheer him.
'You must rouse yourself.'

'What for?'

She sought a good answer to this conundrum. 'For all of us,' she said
lamely, at length.

'Leonora, my lass,' he remarked drily, 'you're no better than the rest
of 'em.'

And as she sat there in the age-worn parlour, and thought of the distant
days of his energy, when with his own hands he had pulled down a wall
and replaced it by a glass partition, and of the night when he lay like
a corpse on Ethel's bed at the mercy of his nephew, and of Aunt Hannah
resting in the cold tomb just at the end of the street, her heart was
filled for a moment with an awful, ineffable, devastating sadness. It
seemed to her that every grief, anxiety, apprehension was joy itself
compared to this supreme tragedy of natural decay.

'Shall I light the gas?' she suggested. The room was always obscure, and
that evening happened to be a sombre one.

'Ay!'

'There!' she said brightly, when the gas flared, 't