Fanny held her husband’s head against her shoulder, and rubbed his hands frantically.  The awful strained look had gone from her face.  Ellen came with the camphor, and then went for water.  Fanny rubbed Andrew’s forehead with the camphor, and held the bottle to his nose.  “Smell it, Andrew,” she said, in a voice of ineffable tenderness and pity.  Ellen returned with a glass of water, and Andrew swallowed a little obediently.  Finally he made out to stagger into the bedroom with Fanny’s and Ellen’s assistance.  He sat down weakly on the bed, and Fanny lifted his legs up.  Then he sank and closed his eyes as if he were spent.  In fact, he was.  At that moment of Ellen’s announcement some vital energy in him suddenly relaxed like overstrained rubber.  His face, sunken in the pillow, was both ghastly and meek.  It was the face of a man who could fight no more.  Ellen knelt down beside him, sobbing.

“Oh, father!” she sobbed, “I think it is for the best.  Dear father, you won’t feel bad.”

“No,” said Andrew, faintly.  There was a slight twitching in his hand, as if he wished to put it on her head, then it lay thin and inert on the coverlid.  He tried to smile, but his face settled into that look of utter acquiescence of fate.

“I s’pose it’s the best you can do,” he muttered.

“Have you told Miss Lennox?” gasped Fanny.

“Yes.”

“What did she say?”

“She was sorry, but she made no objection,” replied Ellen, evasively.

Fanny came forward abruptly, caught up the camphor-bottle, and began bathing Andrew’s forehead again.

“We won’t say any more about it,” said she, in a harsh voice.  “You’d better go over to your grandma Brewster’s and see if she has got any whiskey.  I think your father needs to take something.”

“I don’t want anything,” said Andrew, feebly.

“Yes, you do, too, you are as white as a sheet.  Go over and ask her, Ellen.”

Ellen ran across the yard to her grandmother’s, and the old woman met her at the door.  She seemed to have an instinctive knowledge of trouble.

“What’s the matter?” she asked.

“Father’s a little faint, and mother wants me to borrow the whiskey,” said Ellen.  She had not at that time the courage to tell her grandmother what she had done.

Mrs. Zelotes ran into the house, and came out with the bottle.

“I’m comin’ over,” she announced.  “I’m kind of worried about your father; he ’ain’t looked well for some time.  I wonder what made him faint.  Maybe he ate something which hurt him.”

Ellen said nothing.  She fled up-stairs to her chamber, as her grandmother entered the bedroom.  She felt cowardly, but she thought that she would let her mother tell the news.

She sat down and waited.  She knew that presently she would hear the old woman’s voice at the foot of the stairs.  She was resolved upon her course, and knew that she could not be shaken in it, yet she dreaded unspeakably the outburst of grief and anger which she knew would come from her grandmother.  She felt as if she had faced two fires, and now before the third she quailed a little.