himself inwardly for the question this would raise with his
wife.

"Then you must try to interest him in something. Get him to talking, and
then let Mrs. Stephson come in with a good bowl of broth, and I guess we
may trust Nature to do the rest."

XVI.

When we speak of Nature, we figure her as one thing, with a fixed
purpose and office in the universal economy; but she is an immense
number of things, and her functions are inexpressibly varied. She
includes decay as well as growth; she compasses death as well as birth.
We call certain phenomena unnatural; but in a natural world how can
anything be unnatural, except the supernatural? These facts gave Ewbert
pause in view of the obstinate behavior of Ransom Hilbrook in dying for
no obvious reason, and kept him from pronouncing it unnatural. The old
man, he reflected, had really less reason to live than to die, if it
came to reasons; for everything that had made the world home to him had
gone out of it, and left him in exile here. The motives had ceased; the
interests had perished; the strong personality that had persisted was
solitary amid the familiar environment grown alien.

The wonder was that he should ever have been roused from his apathetic
unfaith to inquiry concerning the world beyond this, and to a certain
degree of belief in possibilities long abandoned by his imagination.
Ewbert had assisted at the miracle of this resuscitation upon terms
which, until he was himself much older, he could not question as to
their beneficence, and in fact it never came to his being quite frank
with himself concerning them. He kept his thoughts on this point in that
state of solution which holds so many conjectures from precipitation in
actual conviction.

But his wife had no misgivings. Her dread was that in his devotion to
that miserable old man (as she called him, not always in compassion) he
should again contribute to Hilbrook's vitality at the expense, if not
the danger, of his own. She of course expressed her joy that Ewbert had
at last prevailed upon him to eat something, when the entreaty of his
nurse and the authority of his doctor availed nothing; and of course she
felt the pathos of his doing it out of affection for Ewbert, and merely
to please him, as Hilbrook declared. It did not surprise her that any
one should do anything for the love of Ewbert, but it is doubtful if she
fully recognized the beauty of this last efflorescence of the aged life;
and she percei