“Why, Mely, child!  I can’t feel right to have it left to hirelin’s so.  But there ain’t anybody any more to see things done as they ought.  If Coonrod was on’y here—­”

“Well, mother, you are pretty mixed!” said Mela, with a strong tendency to break into her large guffaw.  But she checked herself and said:  “I know just how you feel, though.  It keeps acomun’ and agoun’; and it’s so and it ain’t so, all at once; that’s the plague of it.  Well, father!  Ain’t you goun’ to come?”

“I’m goin’ to stay, Mela,” said the old man, gently, without moving.  “Get your mother to bed, that’s a good girl.”

“You goin’ to set up with him, Jacob?” asked the old woman.

“Yes, ’Liz’beth, I’ll set up.  You go to bed.”

“Well, I will, Jacob.  And I believe it ’ll do you good to set up.  I wished I could set up with you; but I don’t seem to have the stren’th I did when the twins died.  I must git my sleep, so’s to—­I don’t like very well to have you broke of your rest, Jacob, but there don’t appear to be anybody else.  You wouldn’t have to do it if Coonrod was here.  There I go ag’in!  Mercy! mercy!”

“Well, do come along, then, mother,” said Mela; and she got her out of the room, with Mrs. Mandel’s help, and up the stairs.

From the top the old woman called down, “You tell Coonrod—­” She stopped, and he heard her groan out, “My Lord! my Lord!”

He sat, one silence in the dining-room, where they had all lingered together, and in the library beyond the hireling watcher sat, another silence.  The time passed, but neither moved, and the last noise in the house ceased, so that they heard each other breathe, and the vague, remote rumor of the city invaded the inner stillness.  It grew louder toward morning, and then Dryfoos knew from the watcher’s deeper breathing that he had fallen into a doze.

He crept by him to the drawing-room, where his son was; the place was full of the awful sweetness of the flowers that Fulkerson had brought, and that lay above the pulseless breast.  The old man turned up a burner in the chandelier, and stood looking on the majestic serenity of the dead face.

He could not move when he saw his wife coming down the stairway in the hall.  She was in her long, white flannel bed gown, and the candle she carried shook with her nervous tremor.  He thought she might be walking in her sleep, but she said, quite simply, “I woke up, and I couldn’t git to sleep ag’in without comin’ to have a look.”  She stood beside their dead son with him, “well, he’s beautiful, Jacob.  He was the prettiest baby!  And he was always good, Coonrod was; I’ll say that for him.  I don’t believe he ever give me a minute’s care in his whole life.  I reckon I liked him about the best of all the children; but I don’t know as I ever done much to show it.  But you was always good to him, Jacob; you always done the best for him, ever since he was a little feller.  I used to be afraid you’d spoil him sometimes