away.

Sometimes in the dead of night, Adelaide or Arthur or Mrs. Ranger,
waking, would hear him hurrying softly, like a ghost, along the halls or
up and down the stairs. They, with the crowding interests that compel the
mind, no matter how fiercely the bereaved heart may fight against
intrusion, would forget for an hour now and then the cause of the black
shadow over them and all the house and all the world; and as the weeks
passed their grief softened and their memories of the dead man began to
give them that consoling illusion of his real presence. But not Simeon;
he could think only that his friend had been there and was gone.

At last the truth in some form must have come to him. For he gave up the
search and the hope, and lay down to die. Food he would not touch; he
neither moved nor made a sound. When Adelaide took him up, he lifted dim
tragic eyes to her for an instant, then sank back as if asleep. One
morning, they found him in Hiram's great arm chair, huddled in its
depths, his head upon his knees, his hairy hands stiff against his
cheeks. They buried him in the clump of lilac bushes of which Hiram had
been especially fond.

Stronger than any other one influence for good upon Adelaide and Arthur
at that critical time, was this object lesson Simeon gave--Simeon with
his single-hearted sorrow and single-minded love.

CHAPTER XV

EARLY ADVENTURES OF A 'PRENTICE

Arthur, about to issue forth at a quarter to seven on Monday morning to
begin work as a cooper's apprentice, felt as if he would find all Saint X
lined up to watch him make the journey in working clothes. He had a bold
front as he descended the lawn toward the gates; but at the risk of
opening him to those with no sympathy for weaknesses other than their
own, and for their own only in themselves, it must be set down that he
seemed to himself to be shaking and skulking. He set his teeth together,
gave himself a final savage cut with the lash of "What a damned coward I
am!" and closed the gate behind him and was in the street--a workingman.
He did not realize it, but he had shown his mettle; for, no man with any
real cowardice anywhere in him would have passed through that gate and
faced a world that loves to sneer.

From the other big houses of that prosperous neighborhood were coming,
also in working clothes, the fathers, and occasionally the sons, of
families he was accustomed to regard as "all right--for Saint X." At the
corner of Cherr