“But I shan’t, young man,” replied Schulze curtly and with a conclusive squeezing together of his homely features.  “Your mother is right.  She gives your father what money can’t buy and skill can’t replace, what has often raised the as-good-as-dead.  Some day, maybe, you’ll find out what that is.  You think you know now, but you don’t.”  And there the matter rested.

The large room adjoining Hiram and Ellen’s bedroom was made over into a sitting room.  The first morning on which he could be taken from his bed and partially dressed, Mrs. Ranger called in both the children to assist her.  The three tried to conceal their feelings as they, not without physical difficulty, lifted that helpless form to the invalid’s chair which Ellen wheeled close to the bedside.  She herself wheeled him into the adjoining room, to the window, with strands of ivy waving in and out in the gentle breeze, with the sun bright and the birds singing, and all the world warm and vivid and gay.  Hiram’s cheeks were wet with tears; they saw some tremendous emotion surging up in him.  He looked at Arthur, at Adelaide, back to Arthur.  Evidently he was trying to say something—­something which he felt must be said.  His right arm trembled, made several convulsive twitches, finally succeeded in lifting his right hand the few inches to the arm of the chair.

“What is it, father?” said Ellen.

“Yes—­yes—­yes,” burst from him in thick, straining utterances.  “Yes—­yes—­yes.”

Mrs. Ranger wiped her eyes.  “He is silent for hours,” she said; “then he seems to want to say something.  But when he speaks, it’s only as just now.  He says ‘Yes—­yes—­yes’ over and over again until his strength gives out.”

The bursting of the blood vessels in his brain had torn out the nerve connection between the seat of power of speech and the vocal organs.  He could think clearly, could put his thoughts into the necessary words; but when his will sent what he wished to say along his nerves toward the vocal organs, it encountered that gap, and could not cross it.

What did he wish to say?  What was the message that could not get through, though he was putting his whole soul into it?  At first he would begin again the struggle to speak, as soon as he had recovered from the last effort and failure; then the idea came to him that if he would hoard strength, he might gather enough to force a passage for the words—­for he did not realize that the connection was broken, and broken forever.  So, he would wait, at first for several hours, later for several days; and, when he thought himself strong enough or could no longer refrain, he would try to burst the bonds which seemed to be holding him.  With his children, or his wife and children, watching him with agonized faces, he would make a struggle so violent, so resolute, that even that dead body was galvanized into a ghastly distortion of tortured life.  Always in vain; always the same collapse of despair and exhaustion;