gh his suggestions, but more than one had been saved by his
counsels. With the expansion of the business of the town newer banks had
gone ahead of his, and when they said he was one of the good substantial
men of the community they were indicating his limitations with his
virtues. Such a man, not a brilliant figure through his lifetime, would
be lamented in his passing. They had often said that he failed in using
his opportunities; what they said now was that he had never abused
them--death, as usual, inducing the living to turn the kindly side to
the truth about the dying.

Ruth did not go downstairs to see the people who were coming in. Ted was
down there, and Flora Copeland, a spinster cousin of the Hollands, who
for several years had lived in the house. Once, in passing through the
hall, she heard voices which she recognized. She stood there listening
to them. It was so strange to hear them; and so good. She was hungry for
voices she knew--old voices. Once there was a pause and her heart beat
fast for she got a feeling that maybe they were going to ask for her.
But they broke that pause to say goodnight. She had received no message
about anyone asking for her.

But even though she was not seeing the people who came she felt the
added strangeness her presence made in that house which had suspended
the usual affairs of living in waiting for death. The nurse was one of
the girls of the town, of a family Ruth knew. She had been only a little
girl at the time Ruth went away. She was conscious, in the young woman's
scrupulously professional manner toward herself, of a covert interest,
as in something mysterious, forbidden. She could see that to this
decorous young person she was a woman out of another world. It hurt her,
and it made her a little angry. She wished that this professional,
proper young woman, stealing glances as at a forbidden thing, could know
the world in which she actually lived.

And yet it occurred to her that the strain was less great than it would
have been at any other time--something about a room of death making the
living a little less prone to divide themselves into good and bad,
approved and condemned. With the approach of death there are likely to
be only two classes--the living and the dead. After the first few hours,
despite the estranging circumstances, there did seem to be some sort of
a bond between her and this girl who attended her father.

Ruth and Ted and Flora Copeland had had dinne