“Is that you, Janet?  You hain’t seen anything of your father?”

The night before Janet had heard this question, and she had been puzzled as to its meaning—­whether in the course of the day she had seen her father, or whether Hannah thought he was coming home.

“He’s at the mill, mother.  You know he has to stay there.”

“I know,” replied Hannah, in a tone faintly reminiscent of the old aspersion.  “But I’ve got everything ready for him in case he should come—­any time—­if the strikers hain’t killed him.”

“But he’s safe where he is.”

“I presume they will try to kill him, before they get through,” Hannah continued evenly.  “But in case he should come at any time, and I’m not here, you tell him all those Bumpus papers are put away in the drawer of that old chest, in the corner.  I can’t think what he’d do without those papers.  That is,” she added, “if you’re here yourself.”

“Why shouldn’t you be here?” asked Janet, rather sharply.

“I dunno, I seem to have got through.”  She glanced helplessly around the kitchen.  “There don’t seem to be much left to keep me alive....  I guess you’ll be wanting your supper, won’t you?  You hain’t often home these days—­whatever it is you’re doing.  I didn’t expect you.”

Janet did not answer at once.

“I—­I have to go out again, mother,” she said.

Hannah accepted the answer as she had accepted every other negative in life, great and small.

“Well, I guessed you would.”

Janet made a step toward her.

“Mother!” she said, but Hannah gazed at her uncomprehendingly.  Janet stooped convulsively, and kissed her.  Straightening up, she stood looking down at her mother for a few moments, and went out of the room, pausing in the dining-room, to listen, but Hannah apparently had not stirred.  She took the box of matches from its accustomed place on the shelf beside the clock, entered the dark bedroom in the front of the flat, closing the door softly behind her.  The ghostly blue light from a distant arc came slanting in at the window, glinting on the brass knobs of the chest of drawers-another Bumpus heirloom.  She remembered that chest from early childhood; it was one of the few pieces that, following them in all their changes of residence, had been faithful to the end:  she knew everything in it, and the place for everything.  Drawing a match from the box, she was about to turn on the gas—­but the light from the arc would suffice.  As she made her way around the walnut bed she had a premonition of poignant anguish as yet unrealized, of anguish being held at bay by a stronger, fiercer, more imperative emotion now demanding expression, refusing at last to be denied.  She opened the top drawer of the chest, the drawer in which Hannah, breaking tradition, had put the Bumpus genealogy.  Edward had never kept it there.  Would the other things be in place?  Groping with her hands in the left-hand corner, her