"When you see me--_that_ way--will you--speak?" "Yes." "Promise, darling." "Yes.... I'll kiss you, too--if it is possible...." "Would it be possible?" The child gazed at her, perplexed and troubled: "I--don't--know," she said slowly. Then, all in a moment her childish face paled and she clung to her mother and began to cry. And her mother soothed her, tenderly, smilingly, kissing the tears from the child's eyes. The next morning after the children had gone to school Mrs. Greensleeve was operated on--without success. CHAPTER III The black dresses of the children had become very rusty by spring, but business had been bad at the Hotel Greensleeve, and Athalie, Doris, and Catharine continued to wear their shabby mourning. Greensleeve haunted the house all day long, roaming from bar to office, from one room to another, silently opening doors of unoccupied chambers to peer about in the dusty obscurity, then noiselessly closing them, he would slink away down the dim corridor to his late wife's room and sit there through the long sunny afternoon, his weak face buried in his hands. Ledlie had grown fatter, redder of visage, whiter of hair and beard. When a rare guest arrived, or when local loafers wandered into the bar with the faint stench of fertilizer clinging to their boots, he shuffled ponderously from office to bar, serving as economically as he dared whoever desired to be served. Always a sprig of something green protruded from his small tight mouth. His pale eyes, now faded almost colourless, had become weak and red-rimmed, and he blinked continually except in the stale semi-darkness of the house. Always, now, he was muttering and grumbling his disapproval of the children--"Eatin' their heads off I tell you, Pete! What good is all this here schoolin' doin' 'em when they ought to git out some'rs an' earn their vittles?" But if Greensleeve's attitude was one of passive acquiescence, he made no effort to withdraw the children from school. Once, when life was younger, and Jack, his first baby, came, he had dreamed of college for him, and of a career--in letters perhaps--something dignified, leisurely, profound beyond his own limits. And of a modest corner somewhere within the lustre of his son's environment where he and his wife, grey-haired, might dream and admire, finding there surcease from care and perhaps the peace which passes all understanding. The ex-"professor" of penmanship had been always prone to dream. No dull and sordid reality, no hopeless sorrow had yet awakened him. Nor had his wife's death been more real than the half-strangled anguish of a dreamer, tossing in darkness. As for the children, they paid no more attention to Ledlie than they might have to a querulous but superannuated dog.