"Yes, yes, dear, I'll go," interrupted the woman hurriedly. "And, Jane!" "Yes." The woman turned and waited. She knew quite well what was coming, but it was the very exquisiteness of her patient care that allowed her to give no sign that she had waited in that same spot to hear those same words every night for long years past. "An' ye might count 'em--them spoons," said the old man. "Yes." "An' the forks." "Yes." "An' them photygraph pictures in the parlor." "All right, father." The woman turned away. Her step was slow, but confident--the last word had been said. To Jane Pendergast her father had gone with the going of his keen, clear mind, twenty years before. This fretful, childish, exacting old man that pottered about the house all day was but the shell that had held the kernel--the casket that had held the jewel. But because of what it had held, Jane guarded it tenderly, laying at its feet her life as a willing sacrifice. There had been four children: Edgar, the eldest; Jane, Mary, and Fred. Edgar had left home early, and was a successful business man in Boston. Mary had married a wealthy lawyer of the same city; and Fred had opened a real estate office in a thriving Southern town. Jane had stayed at home. There had been a time, it is true, when she had planned to go away to school; but the death of Mrs. Pendergast left no one at home to care for Mary and Fred, so Jane had abandoned the idea. Later, after Mary had married and Fred had gone away, there was still her father to be cared for, though at this time he was well and strong. Jane had passed her thirty-fifth birthday, when she became palpitatingly aware of a pair of blue-gray eyes, and a determined, smooth-shaven chin belonging to the recently arrived principal of the village school. In spite of her stern admonition to herself to remember her years and not quite lose her head, she was fast drifting into a rosy dream of romance that was all the more enthralling because so belated, when the summons of a small boy brought her sharply back to the realities. "It's yer father, miss. They want ye ter come," he panted. "Somethin' has took him. He's in Mackey's drug store, talkin' awful queer. He ain't his self, ye know. They thought maybe you could--do somethin'." Jane went at once--but she could do nothing except to lead gently home the chattering, shifting-eyed thing that had once been her father. One after another the village physicians shook their heads--they could do nothing. Skilled alienists from the city--they, too, could do nothing. There was nothing that could be done, they said, except to care for him as one would for a child. He would live years, probably. His constitution was wonderfully good. He would not be violent--just foolish and childish, with perhaps a growing irritability as the years passed and his physical strength failed.