Richie merely flung up his head and set his lips.  Jim put one arm around her.

“He’s pretty ill, dear,” he said gently, and Julia found his smooth tenderness infinitely less bearable than Richie’s bluntness.

“Why, but what are you talking about—­what do you mean—­I don’t know what you mean!” Mrs. Toland said bewilderedly.  “Doctor Barr has gone home, Richie; he said he wouldn’t come back unless we sent for him!” No one answered her, and as her pitiful look went from Julia’s grave face to Richard’s sorrowful one, from Ned’s despairing figure by the fire to Jim’s troubled look, terror seemed to seize her.  Her pretty middle-aged face wrinkled; she began to cry bitterly.

Julia put her in a deep chair, knelt before her, trying rather to calm than to comfort her, and after a while so far succeeded that she could take the poor shaken old lady upstairs.  She did not glance again at Jim, although he opened the door for them, and tried his best to catch her eye.

Between five and six o’clock he was summoned to the sickroom.  They were all there:  the girls on their knees, Richard kneeling by his father, his fingers on the failing pulse.  Mrs. Toland was seated, Julia kneeling beside her, holding both her cold hands.  A sound of subdued sobbing filled the air; no sound came from the dying man except when a fluttering breath raised his chest.  His eyes were shut; he appeared to be sleeping.

The clock on the mantel struck six, and as if roused, Doctor Toland stirred a little, and whispered, “Janey!” Poor Janey’s head went down against the white counterpane; she never dreamed that the little-girl aunt, dead fifty years ago, with apple cheeks under a slatted sun-bonnet, and more apples in her lunch bag, had come in a vision of old orchard and sun-bathed river, to put her warm little hand in her brother’s again, and lead him home.  And before the clock struck again, Robert Toland, with not even a twitch of his kind old face, went smiling away from earth in a dream of childhood, and Richie, with a finger on the silent pulse, and Jim, with a hand on the silent heart, had said together:  “Gone!”

An hour later Jim, standing thoughtful at an upper window, looked down to see Richie bring the runabout to the front door.  Down the steps came Barbara, bare headed, and Julia, in her wide black hat and flying veil.  The three talked for a few moments together, the light from the open hall door falling on their faces; then Julia got into the car.  She leaned out to say some last word to Barbara, her face composed and sweetly grave, then turned to Richie, and they were gone.

Jim would have found it difficult to analyze his own emotion.  Something in that look toward Barbara, so brave and quiet, so bright with some inward serenity, stirred his heart.  He went downstairs to meet Barbara in the hall.

“Where’s Rich?” asked Jim, in the hushed voice that had supplanted all the usual noise and gayety of the house.