He changed the subject, and would not go back to it; and after a few minutes he telephoned Adelaide, ordered a cart, and set out to take her for a drive.  Mrs. Whitney watched him depart with a heavy heart and so piteous a face that Ross was moved almost to the point of confiding in her what he was pretending not to admit to himself.  “Ross is sensible beyond his years,” she said to herself sadly, “but youth is so romantic.  It never can see beyond the marriage ceremony.”

Adelaide, with as much haste as was compatible with the demands of so important an occasion, was getting into a suitable costume.  Suddenly she laid aside the hat she had selected from among several that were what the Fifth Avenue milliners call the “dernier cri.”  “No, I’ll not go!” she exclaimed.

Ever since her father was stricken she had stayed near him.  Ellen had his comfort and the household to look after, and besides was not good at initiating conversation and carrying it on alone; Arthur’s tongue was paralyzed in his father’s presence by his being unable for an instant to forget there what had occurred between them.  So Del had borne practically the whole burden of filling the dreary, dragging hours for him—­who could not speak, could not even show whether he understood or not.  He had never been easy to talk to; now, when she could not tell but that what she said jarred upon a sick and inflamed soul, aggravating his torture by reminding him of things he longed to know yet could not inquire about, tantalizing him with suggestions—­She dared not let her thoughts go far in that direction; it would soon have been impossible to send him any message beyond despairing looks.

Sometimes she kissed him.  She knew he was separated from her as by a heavy, grated prison door, and was unable to feel the electric thrill of touch; yet she thought he must get some joy out of the sight of the dumb show of caress.  Again, she would give up trying to look cheerful, and would weep—­and let him see her weep, having an instinct that he understood what a relief tears were to her, and that she let him see them to make him feel her loving sympathy.  Again, she would be so wrought upon by the steady agony of those fixed eyes that she would leave him abruptly to hide herself and shudder, tearless, at the utter misery and hopelessness of it all.  She wondered at her mother’s calm until she noticed, after a few weeks, how the face was withering with that shriveling which comes from within when a living thing is dying at the core.

She read the Bible to him, selecting consolatory passage with the aid of a concordance, in the evenings after he had been lifted into bed for the night.  She was filled with protest as she read; for it seemed to her that this good man, her best of fathers, thus savagely and causelessly stricken, was proof before her eyes that the sentences executed against men were not divine, but the devilish emanations of brute chance.