"Hush, darling!" Harry said, with a glance at Evelyn, who stood looking on with a puzzled, troubled expression on her little face. Harry took off his overcoat, and they all went into the parlor. "That fire looks good," said Harry, drawing close to it. "I got Maria to ask Irene to make it," Evelyn said, in her childish voice. "That was a good little girl," said Harry. He sat down on the divan, with a daughter on each side of him. Maria nestled close to her father. With an effort she kept her quivering face straight. She dared not look in his face again. A knell seemed ringing in her ears from her own conviction, a voice of her inner consciousness, which kept reiterating, "Father is going to die, father is going to die." Maria knew little of illness, but she felt that she could not mistake that expression. But her father talked quite gayly, asking her about her school and Aunt Maria and Uncle Henry and his wife. Maria replied mechanically. Finally she mustered courage to say: "How are you feeling, father? Are you well?" "I am about the same as when you went away, dear," Harry replied, and that expression of stern, almost ineffable patience deepened on his face. He smiled directly, however, and asked Evelyn what train her mother had taken. "She won't be home until the seven-thirty train," said Harry, "and there is no use in our waiting dinner. You must be hungry, Maria. Evelyn, darling, speak to Irene. I hear her in the dining-room." Evelyn obeyed, and Harry gave his orders that dinner should be served as soon as possible. The girl smiled at him with a coquettish air. "Irene is pleasanter to papa than to anybody else," Evelyn observed, meditatively, when Irene had gone out. "I guess girls are apt to be pleasanter to gentlemen than to little girls." Harry laughed and kissed the child's high forehead. "Little girls are just as well off if they don't study out other people's peculiarities too much," he said. "They are very interesting," said Evelyn, with an odd look at him, yet an entirely innocent look. Maria was secretly glad that this first evening She was not there, that she could dine alone with her father and Evelyn. It was a drop of comfort, and yet the awful knell never ceased ringing in her ears--"Father is going to die, father is going to die." Maria made an effort to eat, because her father watched her anxiously. "You are not as stout as you were when you went away, precious," he said. "I am perfectly well," said Maria. "Well, I must say you do look well," said Harry, looking admiringly at her. He admired his little Evelyn, but no other face in the world upon which he was soon to close his eyes forever was quite so beautiful to him as Maria's. "You look very much as your own mother used to do," he said.