With a frozen sense of her alienism, Lilly sat, as it were, outside the situation, proffering herself almost with a sense of intrusion. The doctor would not pronounce, but left with instructions and the promise of a midnight return. Into that Mrs. Becker read darkly. "He's a sick man or one of these busy New York doctors wouldn't be returning again to-night. My boy is a sick man." Meanwhile Albert had fallen into a light sleep. They sat beside his bedside watching his lips puff out, sometimes in bubbles. The silence of midnight descended over the transient formality of the hotel room. Undoubtedly Albert had a fever which seemed to be rising. He moistened his lips now constantly and threw himself about beneath the coverings, and then Mrs. Becker, not to be restrained, would lean forward to brush backward from his brow, as if there were hair. At midnight the doctor returned and at one o'clock Albert was removed to Murray Hill Hospital. He was ill three days, slipping off almost from the beginning into a state of coma from which he did not emerge. With a celerity that was presently to race it through the country, this strange malady laid low its victim with what might have been pneumonia, except for certain complications that baffled and alarmed an already thoroughly aroused medical world. The second day a sort of dark rash broke out over Albert's chest, so that his nurses entered the room in gauze masks, and finally, in spite of Lilly's protestations and Mrs. Becker's most violent hysterics, no admittance to the sick room was granted them. And now comes a tide in the affairs of Lilly Penny which, being too true life, is not sufficiently true to fiction. On the day that was to have been Zoe's formal graduation from High School, so that the pearl-embroidered slippers were never worn and her diploma brought home to her by a classmate, Albert Penny died, with no more furor than he had lived. Stupor enveloped Lilly. She moved through days incredibly crowded with detail, and yet, somehow, so withdrawn into the very nub of herself that it was the shell of her seemed to compete with the passing time. Certainly it was this shell of her followed Albert in that strangest of little processions, to his cremation. There had been an effort to travel west with the remains, but quarantine conditions forbade, and it was just as well so. Four times on that ride through a warm summer rain to the crematory Mrs. Becker went off into light faints, sobbing herself back into consciousness. It frightened Lilly to look at her father; his face had dropped into hollows and the roundness of his back was suddenly a decided hump. And he had fallen into a silence. A sort of hollow urn of it that not even the outbursts of his wife could rouse to his usual soothing chirpings. He merely sat stroking her hand and staring into a silence which he seemed to see.