Reluctantly Lois gave her the dispatch, but she scarcely looked at it. "Uncle Henry," she said, for Mr. Dale had followed her, and stood in speechless sympathy, his white hair blowing about in the keen wind, "I will go to Mercer now. I can make the train. Will you let me have your carriage?" Her voice was so firm and her manner so calm Lois was deceived. "She does not understand how ill John is," she thought. But Mr. Dale knew better. "How love's horror of death sweeps away all small things," he said, as he sat alone in his study that night,--"time, hope, fear, even grief itself!" His wife did not enter into such analysis; she had been summoned, and had seen to wraps and money and practical things, and then had gone crying up-stairs. "Poor child," she said, "poor child! She doesn't feel it yet." A calamity like this Mrs. Dale could understand; she had known the sorrow of death, and all the impatience which had stood between Helen and herself was swept away in her pitying sympathy. As for Lois, Helen had not forbidden her, and she too had gone to Mercer. Helen had not seemed even to notice her presence in the carriage, and she dared not speak. She thought, in a vague way, that she had never known her cousin before. Helen, with white, immovable face, sat leaning forward, her hand on the door, her tearless eyes straining into the distance, and a tense, breathless air of waiting about her. "May I go to Lockhaven with you?" Lois asked softly; but Helen did not answer until she had repeated the question, and then she turned with the start of one suddenly wakened, and looked at her. "Oh, you are here?" she said. "You were good to come, but you must not go further than Mercer." Then she noticed that the window beside Lois was open, and leaned forward to close it. After that, she lapsed again into her stony silence. When they reached the station, it was she who bought the ticket, and then again seemed startled to find the girl by her side. "Good-by," she said, as Lois kissed her, but there was no change in her face, either of relief or regret, when her cousin left her. How that long slow journey passed Helen never knew. She was not even conscious of its length. When Gifford met her, she gave him one questioning look. "Yes," he said tenderly, "you are in time. He would not let me send before, Helen; and I knew you would not come unless I said, 'John sends for you.'" "No," she answered. He told her, in their quick ride to the parsonage, that this had been the third hemorrhage, and John had not rallied; but it was not until the night before that he had known the end was inevitable and near, and had sent for his wife. Oh, the strangeness of those village streets! Had she ever been away? These months in Ashurst were a dream; here only was reality and death.