Gilder, who met me on the street soon after our arrival in New York, spoke to me in praise of _Her Mountain Lover_. "I predict a great success for it. It has beauty----" here he smiled. "I am always preaching 'beauty' to you, but you need it! You should remember that the writing which is beautiful is the writing which lasts." He was looking thin and bent and gray, and I experienced a keen pang of fear. "Gilder is growing old," I thought, and this feeling of change was deepened a few days later by the death of Charles Dudley Warner. "The older literary men, the Writers who have been my guides and my exemplars, are dropping away! I am no longer 'a young and promising novelist.' It is time I delivered my message--if I have any," I reminded myself, with a realization that I was now in the mid-ranks, pushed on by younger and more vigorous authors. Frank Norris and Stewart Edward White were crowding close upon my lagging heels. With this in my thought I got out my manuscript and set to work. I would have been entirely happy in the midst of many delightful meetings with my fellow craftsmen had it not been for a growing sense of anxiety concerning my mother's condition. Father's brief notes were not reassuring. "Your mother needs you," he said, in effect, and I began to plan our return. "We have a few engagements," I wrote, "but you may expect us for our usual Thanksgiving Dinner." I will not say that I had a definite premonition of trouble, I was just uneasy. I felt inclined to drop all our social engagements and start for home but I did not carry out the impulse. On Sunday, the twenty-fifth of November, after a delightful dinner with Augustus Thomas in his home at New Rochelle, Zulime and I returned to our apartment in happiest humor, to be met by a telegram which went to my heart like the thrust of a bayonet. It was from my father. "_Your mother is very low. Come at once._" For a few moments I remained standing, like a man stunned by a savage blow. Then I awoke to the need of haste in getting away to the West. It was five o'clock in the afternoon, and the last train which would enable us to connect with the Milwaukee train from Chicago to West Salem, left at half-past six. "We must make that train," I said to Zulime with a desperate realization of the need of haste. The rush of packing, the excitement of getting to the station kept me from the sinking of spirit, the agony of self-accusation which set in the moment we were safely in the sleeping car, and speeding on our homeward way. "If only we can reach her before it is too late," was my prayer. "I shall never forgive myself for leaving her. I knew she was not well," I confessed to Zulime, whose serene optimism comforted me, or at least dulled the edge of my self-reproach. Again I telegraphed that we were coming, giving the name and number of our train, hoping to have an encouraging reply from father or the doctor during the evening, but none came.