There were anxious hearts and troubled faces in the farmhouse that day, for Death was brooding there again, and they who watched his shadow darkening around them spoke only in whispers, as they obeyed the physician’s orders.  When Richard first came in Mrs. Markham wound her arm around his neck, and said, “I am so sorry for you, my poor boy,” while the three sons, one after another, had grasped their brother’s hand in token of sympathy, and that was all that had passed between them of greeting.  For the rest of the day, Richard had sat constantly by Ethelyn, watching the changes of her face, and listening to her as she raved in snatches, now of himself, and the time he saved her from the maddened cow, and now of Frank and the huckleberries, which she said were ripening on the Chicopee hills.  When she talked of this Richard held his breath, and once, as he leaned forward so as not to lose a word, he caught Aunt Barbara regarding him intently, her wrinkled cheek flushing as she met his eye and guessed what was in his mind.  If Richard had needed any confirmation of his suspicions, that look on transparent Aunt Barbara’s face would have confirmed them.  There had been something between Ethelyn and Frank Van Buren more than a cousinly liking, and Richard’s heart throbbed powerfully as he sat by the tossing, restless Ethelyn, moaning on about the huckleberry hills, and the ledge of rocks where the wild laurels grew.  This pain he did not try to analyze; he only said to himself that he felt no bitterness toward Ethelyn.  She was too near to death’s dark tide for that.  She was Ethie—­his darling—­the mother of the child that had been buried from sight before he came.  Perhaps she did not love him, and never would; but he had loved her, oh! so much, and if he lost her he would be wretched indeed.  And so, forgiving all the past of which he knew, and trying to forgive all he did not know, he sat by her till the sun went down, and his mother came for the twentieth time, urging him to eat.  He had not tasted food that day, and faint for the want of it he followed her to where the table had been set, and supper prepared with a direct reference to his particular taste.

He felt better and stronger when supper was over, and listened eagerly while Andy and Eunice, who had been the last with Ethelyn before her sudden illness, recounted every incident as minutely and reverently as if speaking of the dead.  Especially did he hang on what Andy said with reference to her questioning him about the breaking of a wicked vow, and when Eunice added her mite to the effect that, getting up for some camphor for an aching tooth, she had heard a groan from Ethelyn’s room, and had found her mistress bending over a half-finished letter, which she “reckoned” was to him, and had laid away in the portfolio, he waited for no more, but hurried upstairs to the little bookcase where Eunice had put the treasure—­for it was a countless treasure, that unfinished letter, which he read with the great tears rolling down his