She walked to the opened door and looked at Anthony where he lay stretched out to die, covered as she had covered him. He was sleeping profoundly, his breath continuing. The evening was early as yet; later she would look for others to come, Frank and a friend or two of Horace’s. She went back to her seat by the fire, and Horace was still speaking. “Then I recollect we set-to to finish up the job Mike proposed for us, to walk down every street and alley in town. ‘We’ll slight not one,’ Mike said. ‘No alley or by-way so humble it would be said we wouldn’t walk on it,’ Mike said. That’s how I ever got in the alley back of the jail, I reckon. ‘I drink to the health of the unborn,’ Mike said, up in Tom’s room before we went over to the Christmas tree, and had you in mind, you understand. Mike was always a good friend of mine. I’ve been richly endowed with friendship all my life, good friends as any you’ll ever see any man have.... That my father should ’a’ come you might say to poverty in his old age, to actual poverty. Those sneaken, low-down, three-times-damned hounds that got his property. I’ll do something about it yet. Put up Les Robinson for governor and all the low-down sharks in the state got the pickens of his purse. They’re not done with me yet, not by a jugful. That my father, Anthony Bell, should.... The old man adored you, always from the start. I could see it, you no bigger than two years old. Believed in you. ‘She’s got a rare musical talent,’ he said. Used to get warmed up over it, you no bigger than that high. What’ll become of us now, we two the only ones left? We’ll have to console each other, get near together. The world, it’ll be a lonesome place for me and you without the old man.” Theodosia was distraught when he began to weep. She walked to the inner door again, but when she returned his head was in his hands, his body bowed forward. Retelling all that he had said of Anthony he cried aloud, “A fine old man. I’ll be a bereft man now,” turning his mind toward self-pity. “Come to your father’s arms, Dosia. My heart, it’s broken. Come kiss your poor old father.” She kept in her place. “I’ll stay where I am,” she said. She had moved to a chair toward the table, toward her grandfather’s door, and sat erect. The large heavy sideboard reached beyond her, too near, as if she were crowded into its shadow, as if she were something living that was being expelled from the dark, dead mass of the furniture, pushed outward into a quivering point of pain. She stared at the dim pattern in the carpet, or she moved and stood before the sideboard, her arms folded together. Her tears were gone now and she gathered herself together in the act of folding her arms. Expelled from the entire room, from all the history of the place, she turned about without guidance and stood near the wall. “You poor child. Come to my arms,” he said, coming near to her.