“I have so little presence of mind. I forgot to tell you in time, dear. Why, because Wena _has licked my face all over_, darling. Darling, yes, she _has_, I say. You are too bad not to care about it. Now come to my own best father, dear. Offer your arm like a gentleman.” So they—as Milton concisely says. Homer would have written “they two.” How sadly our language wants a dual! We, the domestic race, have we rejected it because the use would have seemed a truism? * * * * * That same afternoon Bull Garnet lay dying, calmly and peacefully going off, taking his accounts to a larger world. He knew that there were some heavy items underscored against him; but he also knew that the mercy of God can even outdo the hope He gives us for token and for keepsake. A greater and a grander end, after a life of mark and power, might, to his early aspirations and self–conscious strength, have seemed the bourne intended. If it had befallen him—as but for himself it would have done—to appear where men are moved by passion, vigour, and bold decision, his name would have been historical, and better known to the devil. As it was, he lay there dying, and was well content. The turbulence of life was past, the torrent and the eddy, the attempt at fore–reaching upon his age, and sense of impossibility, the strain of his mental muscles to stir the great dead trunks of “orthodoxy,” and then the self–doubt, the chill, the depression, which follow such attempts, as surely as ague tracks the pioneer. Thank God, all this was over now, and the violence gone, and the dark despair. Of all the good and evil things which so had branded him distinct, two yet dwelled in his feeble heart, only two still showed their presence in his dying eyes. Each of those two was good, if two indeed they were—faith in the heavenly Father, and love of the earthly children. Pearl was sitting on a white chair at the side of the bed away from the window, with one hand in his failing palm, and the other trying now and then to enable her eyes to see things. She was thinking, poor little thing, of what she should do without him, and how he had been a good father to her, though she never could understand him. That was her own fault, no doubt. She had always fancied that he loved her as a bit of his property, as a thing to be managed; now she knew that it was not so; and he was going away for ever, and who would love or manage her? And the fault of all this was her own.