But in the midst of it all, when everything in the outside world danced with life and vigor, and the little house could hardly hold its sweet content,—­without a glimmer of warning, without a moment’s fear or dread, without the precious agony of parting, Mrs. Oliver slipped softly, gently, safely, into the Great Silence.

Mercifully it was Edgar, not Polly, who found her in her accustomed place on the cushions, lying with closed eyelids and smiling lips.

It was half past five. . . .  Polly must have gone out at four, as usual, and would be back in half an hour. . . .  Yung Lee was humming softly in the little kitchen. . . .  In five minutes Edgar Noble had suffered, lived, and grown ten years.  He was a man. . . .  And then came Polly,—­and Mrs. Bird with her, thank Heaven!—­Polly breathless and glowing, looking up at the bay window for her mother’s smile of welcome.

In a few seconds the terrible news was broken, and Polly, overpowered with its awful suddenness, dropped before it as under a physical blow.

It was better so.  Mrs. Bird carried her home for the night, as she thought, but a merciful blur stole over the child’s tired brain, and she lay for many weeks in a weary illness of delirium and stupor and fever.

Meanwhile, Edgar acted as brother, son, and man of the house.  He it was who managed everything, from the first sorrowful days up to the closing of the tiny upper flat where so much had happened:  not great things of vast outward importance, but small ones,—­little miseries and mortifications and struggles and self-denials and victories, that made the past half year a milestone in his life.

A week finished it all!  It takes a very short time, he thought, to scatter to the winds of heaven all the gracious elements that make a home.  Only a week; and in the first days of June, Edgar went back to Santa Barbara for the summer holidays without even a sight of his brave, helpful girl-comrade.

He went back to his brother’s congratulations, his sister’s kisses, his mother’s happy tears, and his father’s hearty hand-clasp, full of renewed pride and belief in his eldest son.  But there was a shadow on the lad’s high spirits as he thought of gay, courageous, daring Polly, stripped in a moment of all that made life dear.

“I wish we could do something for her, poor little soul,” he said to his mother in one of their long talks in the orange-tree sitting-room.  “Tongue cannot tell what Mrs. Oliver has been to me, and I ’m not a bit ashamed to own up to Polly’s influence, even if she is a girl and two or three years younger than I am.  Hang it!  I ’d like to see the fellow that could live under the same roof as those two women, and not do the best that was in him!  Has n’t Polly some relatives in the East?”