Her anger fell; she sank, forlorn, into a chair. For both, the day had shriveled and shadowed. And as he turned and left the room the warmth and joy died from air and sky and earth; both of them felt the latent chill--it seemed not a reminiscence of winter past but the icy foreboding of winter closing in. When Olivia came back that evening from shopping in Indianapolis she found her cousin packing. "Is it something from home?" she asked, alarmed. Pauline did not look up as she answered: "No--but I'm going home--to stay--going in the morning. I've telegraphed them." "To stay!" "Yes--I was married to Jack--here--last fall." "You--married! To JOHN DUMONT--you, only seventeen--oh, Pauline--" And Olivia gave way to tears for the first time since she was a baby. Scarborough was neither at supper nor at breakfast--Pauline left without seeing him again. VIII. THE DECISION. When the sign-board on a station platform said "5.2 miles to St. X," Pauline sank back in her chair in the parlor-car with blanched face. And almost immediately, so it seemed to her, Saint X came into view--home! She fancied she could see the very house as she looked down on the mass of green in which the town was embowered. The train slid into the station, slowed down--there were people waiting on the platform--her father! He was glancing from window to window, trying to catch a glimpse of her; and his expression of almost agonized eagerness made her heartsick. She had been away from him for nearly seven months--long enough to break the habit which makes it impossible for members of a family to know how they really look to each other. How gray and thin his beard seemed! What was the meaning of that gaunt look about his shoulders? What was the strange, terrifying shadow over him? "Why, he's OLD!" The tears welled into her eyes--"He's gliding away from me!" She remembered what she had to tell him and her knees almost refused to support her. He was at the step as she sprang down. She flew into his arms. He held her away from him and scanned her face with anxious eyes. "Is my little girl ill?" he asked. "The telegram made me uneasy." "Oh, no!" she said with a reassuring hug. "Where's mother?" "She--she's got a--a--surprise for you. We must hurry--she'll be impatient, though she's seen you since I have." At the curbstone stood the familiar surrey, with Mordecai humped upon the front seat. "I don't see how the colonel ever knowed you," said he, as she shook hands with him. "I never seen the like for growin'." "But YOU look just the same, Mordecai--you and the surrey and the horses. And how's Amanda?" "Poorly," replied Mordecai--his invariable answer to inquiries about his wife. She patterned after the old school, which held that for a woman to confess to good health was for her to confess to lack of refinement, if not of delicacy.