A few seconds and Hiram was alone staring down at the surface of the table, where he could still see and read the will.  His conscience told him he had “put his house in order”; but he felt as if he had set fire to it with his family locked within, and was watching it and them burn to ashes, was hearing their death cries and their curses upon him.

* * * * *

The two young people, chilled by Mrs. Whitney’s manner, flawless though it was, apparently, had watched with sinking hearts the disappearance of her glittering chariot and her glistening steeds.  Then they had gone into the garden before Torrey and the clerks arrived.  And they sat there thinking each his own kind of melancholy thoughts.

“What did she mean by that remark about Doctor Hargrave?” asked Arthur, after some minutes of this heavy silence.

“I don’t know,” said Adelaide.

“We must get mother to go at father,” Arthur continued.

Adelaide made no answer.

Arthur looked at her irritably.  “What are you thinking about, Del?” he demanded.

“I don’t like Mrs. Whitney.  Do you?”

“Oh, she’s a good enough imitation of the real thing,” said Arthur.  “You can’t expect a lady in the first generation.”

Adelaide’s color slowly mounted.  “You don’t mean that,” said she.

He frowned and retorted angrily:  “There’s a great deal of truth that we don’t like.  Why do you always get mad at me for saying what we both think?”

“I admit it’s foolish and wrong of me,” said she; “but I can’t help it.  And if I get half-angry with you, I get wholly angry with myself for being contemptible enough to think those things.  Don’t you get angry at yourself for thinking them?”

Arthur laughed mirthlessly—­an admission.

“We and father can’t both be right,” she pursued.  “I suppose we’re both partly right and partly wrong—­that’s usually the way it is.  But I can’t make up my mind just where he begins to be wrong.”

“Why not admit he’s right through and through, and be done with it?” cried Arthur impatiently.  “Why not tell him so, and square yourself with him?”

Adelaide, too hurt to venture speech, turned away.  She lingered a while in the library; on her way down the hall to ascend to her own room she looked in at her father.  There he sat so still that but for the regular rise and fall of his chest she would have thought him dead.  “He’s asleep,” she murmured, the tears standing in her eyes and raining in her heart.  Her mother she could judge impartially; her mother’s disregard of the changes which had come to assume so much importance in her own and Arthur’s lives often made her wince.  But the same disregard in a man did not offend her; it had the reverse effect.  It seemed to her, to the woman in her, the fitting roughness of the colossal statue.  “That’s a man!” she now said to herself proudly, as she gazed at him.