“Better so, a great deal better than the other way.  Don’t hold up till you’ve had it out,” he kept repeating, while Richard wept, until the fountain was dry and the tears refused to flow.

“I’ve been a brute, Andy,” he said, when at last he could speak.  “The fault was all my own.  I did not understand her in the least.  I ought never to have married her.  She was not of my make at all.”

Andy would hear nothing derogatory of Richard any more than of Ethelyn, and he answered promptly:  “But, Dick, Ethie was some to blame.  She didn’t or’to marry you feelin’ as she did.  That was where the wrong began.”

This was the most and the worst Andy ever said against Ethelyn, and he repented of that the moment the words were out of his mouth.  It was mean to speak ill of the absent, especially when the absent one was Ethie, who had written, “In fancy I put my arms around your neck and kiss your dear, kind face.”  Andy deemed himself a monster of ingratitude when he recalled these lines and remembered that of her who penned them he had said, “She was some to blame.”  He took it all back to himself, and tried to exonerate Ethie entirely, though it was hard work to do so where he saw how broken, and stunned, and crushed his brother was, and how little he realized what was passing around him.

“He don’t know much more than I do,” was Andy’s mental comment, when to his question, “What shall we do next?” Richard replied, in a maudlin kind of way, “Yes, that is a very proper course.  I leave it entirely to you.”

Andy felt that a great deal was depending upon himself, and he tried to meet the emergency.  Seeing how Richard continued to shiver, and how cold he was, he persuaded him to lie down upon the bed, and piling the blankets upon him, made such a fire as he said to himself, “would roast a common ox”; then, when Hal Clifford came to the door and knocked, he kept him out, with that “Dick had been broke of his rest, and was tryin’ to make it up.”

But this state of things could not last long.  Richard was growing ill, and talking so strangely withal, that Andy began to feel the necessity of having somebody there beside himself; “some of the wimmen folks, who knew what to do, for I’m no better than a settin’ hen,” he said.

Very naturally his thoughts turned to his mother as the proper person to come, “though Melinda Jones was the properest of the two.  There was snap to her, and she would not go to pitchin’ in to Ethie.”

Accordingly, the next mail carried to Melinda Jones a note from Andy, which was as follows: 

“Miss Melinda Jones:  Dear Madam—­We found the letters Ethie writ, one to me, and one to Dick, and Dick’s was too much for him.  He lies like a punk of wood, makin’ a moanin’ noise, and talkin’ such queer things, that I guess you or somebody or’to come and see to him a little.  I send to you because there’s no nonsense about you, and you are made of the right kind of stuff.