One of the preachers that were always dropping in on them was there to dinner, and in the blessing he invoked on the temporalities, as he called them, he prayed with professional unction for the son who was about to leave the old roof-tree, and this made the ordeal harder for them all. Doctor Marley spoke to the preacher of little things that he was to do within the next few days and Marley wondered how he could mention them, for they were to be done at a time when he would be there no more. Because he conceived of life, as all must conceive of it, solely in its relation to himself, he could not imagine life going on in Macochee without him. The afternoon wore on, he passed his hour with Lavinia; they were to meet then but once again; he returned home, his mother had packed his trunk; it was waiting. He was tender with his mother, and he wondered now, with a wild regret, why he had not always been tender with her; he was tender now with all things; a tenderness suffused his whole being; it seemed as if it might dissolve in tears. Still he shrank back; there was one thing more to do; he was to go up-town and get his ticket, and the letter to Judge Johnson, and bid Wade Powell good-by. A wild hope leaped in his heart; perhaps--but no, it was irrevocable now. He went, and got his letter, but Powell refused to bid him good-by; he said he would be at the train to see him off. He bought his ticket and went home. Old man Downing had been there with his dray and hauled away his trunk; it was settled. He could only wait and watch the minutes tick by. It seemed to Marley that all things that evening conspired to accentuate all that he was leaving behind, and to make the grief of parting more poignant. His mother, who was then in that domestic exigency described by the ladies of Macochee as being without a girl, had prepared an unusually elaborate supper, and while there was no formal observance of the fact, it was eaten, so far as any of them could eat that evening, under a sense of its significance as a parting ceremonial. They talked, or tried to talk, indifferently of commonplace things, and Doctor Marley even sought to add merriment to their feast by a jocularity that was unusual with him. Marley, who knew his father so well, could easily detect the heavy heart that lay under his father's jokes, and he suffered a keener misery from the pathos of it. Then he would catch his mother looking at him, her eyes deep and sad, and it seemed to him that his heart must burst.