It was very low inside the house, and so dim, with the closed blinds, that they could scarcely see one another:  Editha tall and black in her crapes which filled the air with the smell of their dyes; her father standing decorously apart with his hat on his forearm, as at funerals; a woman rested in a deep arm-chair, and the woman who had let the strangers in stood behind the chair.

The seated woman turned her head round and up, and asked the woman behind her chair:  “Who did you say?”

Editha, if she had done what she expected of herself, would have gone down on her knees at the feet of the seated figure and said, “I am George’s Editha,” for answer.

But instead of her own voice she heard that other woman’s voice, saying:  “Well, I don’t know as I did get the name just right.  I guess I’ll have to make a little more light in here,” and she went and pushed two of the shutters ajar.

Then Editha’s father said, in his public will-now-address-a-few-remarks tone:  “My name is Balcom, ma’am—­Junius H. Balcom, of Balcom’s Works, New York; my daughter—­”

“Oh!” the seated woman broke in, with a powerful voice, the voice that always surprised Editha from Gearson’s slender frame.  “Let me see you.  Stand round where the light can strike on your face,” and Editha dumbly obeyed.  “So, you’re Editha Balcom,” she sighed.

“Yes,” Editha said, more like a culprit than a comforter.

“What did you come for?” Mrs. Gearson asked.

Editha’s face quivered and her knees shook.  “I came—­because—­because George—­” She could go no further.

“Yes,” the mother said, “he told me he had asked you to come if he got killed.  You didn’t expect that, I suppose, when you sent him.”

“I would rather have died myself than done it!” Editha said, with more truth in her deep voice than she ordinarily found in it.  “I tried to leave him free—­”

“Yes, that letter of yours, that came back with his other things, left him free.”

Editha saw now where George’s irony came from.

“It was not to be read before—­unless—­until—­I told him so,” she faltered.

“Of course, he wouldn’t read a letter of yours, under the circumstances, till he thought you wanted him to.  Been sick?” the woman abruptly demanded.

“Very sick,” Editha said, with self-pity.

“Daughter’s life,” her father interposed, “was almost despaired of, at one time.”

Mrs. Gearson gave him no heed.  “I suppose you would have been glad to die, such a brave person as you!  I don’t believe he was glad to die.  He was always a timid boy, that way; he was afraid of a good many things; but if he was afraid he did what he made up his mind to.  I suppose he made up his mind to go, but I knew what it cost him by what it cost me when I heard of it.  I had been through one war before.  When you sent him you didn’t expect he would get killed.”